Valli!

                                                                                    Valli

Sivanesan did not know what to speak. The girl should be around 18 whereas he was 30 with a wife, Nayagi and a daughter who was eleven years of age. So he treated this new girl who looked at that time of the day like a    small dew drop reflecting all the colours of the rainbow! Though he wanted to engage her in a conversation, the fact that she was making eyes at him quite unsettled him. His tongue had become tied and he could not eke out a single syllable from it!

“Why are you looking at me like that, man!” she rolled her eyes as though to frighten him out of his wits. That had not been necessary. Sivanesan had already become petrified: he was conscious of having a conversation with Manikkam and the old man on the wall, and all of a sudden the rising sun was telling him he had indeed become transported to a different world indeed. And this girl’s quaintly chaste Tamil, like in the old black and white Tamil movies, also intrigued him much apart from being a frightening fact that there are still people who speak in such old version of chaste Tamil.

“Hello, sir! I am talking to you only!” said the girl, ”Answer my queries or else I am going to hand you over to the King’s men!

This had indeed made Sivanesan to throw his head back and laugh uproariously. “So , you’re gonna hand me over to the police, yeah? Now, that is a threat coming from you is especially ...ha! ha! Ha!” Once again Sivanesan started to laugh.

The man’s dusky complexion, the peculiar way he had cut his hair and his quaint moustache and the way he laughed all made some conflicting emotions inside the girl. Her eyes glinted with sparks of fire. ”Are you laughing at me or my mention of our great king, sir? Tell me, or else!” Her one hand clutched to the branch on which she was even now swinging with swirling petticoat and the sparks of her legs showing like lightning up to her knee, when her other hand went to a small conch that was hanging suspended from a length  of red thread around her midriff. You know what will happen if I blow this conch like this?”

It was amazing that such a small girl could produce such a piercing whistle from such a small conch!

 “Hey! But that was a feat in itself!” ejaculated Sivanesan. “Where did you learn the art, my girl?”

“I am not your girl!” pat came the reply, though there was a shade of a smile hovering around the corner of her mouth. The man certainly intrigued her. But there was something in her telling this alien was not a bad man. Yet she could not muster up enough courage to engage him in further conversation. She must know that he was not a spy from any neighbouring country! “Aren’t you a spy from some country? Speak up! My name is Valli and my father working at the palace. So I could safeguard you from harm’s way! Anytime the king’s soldiers would be here!”