Tiger Hills

by Sarita Mandanna

  After mulling it over for some days, the Nayak pronounced it an excellent idea. To everyone’s astonishment, Devanna quietly agreed, even when he learned that Devi would not be going back to school because the housework was too much for Tayi and Chengappa’s new wife to manage alone. He did not go to the Nachimanda house for the remainder of that monsoon, not until the day before he was due to go back to school. Tayi came quietly out and hugged him to her. “Where have you been, monae?” she asked. “Have you forgotten us? Devi, look who has come to see us.”

  They went down to the fields, by the stream.

  “Did you hear I am not coming back to school?” she asked.

  Devanna nodded. Devi dipped her hand into the water. “Do you remember how many crabs we caught that day?”

  “Can I forget? They kept coming and coming; we could do no wrong, it seemed. We counted them all. Thirty-three we caught, in that single afternoon … and Tayi made so much crab chutney … ”

  “Yes, and you stuffed your face till you vomited in the bushes,” Devi said wanly. They sat silently for a while, dangling their legs in the stream.

  “Devi, I am really sorry,” he said in a rush. “I wish … I … I should have spoken up sooner. Maybe … the Reverend, had he come earlier … ”

  Devi blanched and her eyes filled with tears. She dashed them away with the back of her hand. “No … ,” she said shakily, “it was not your fault.”

  Devanna looked at her grief-stricken face, and his guilt, the misery of the past weeks all came bubbling to the surface. He began to cry. “I am sorry,” he said. “Devi, I am so sorry.”

  “Silly fellow!” Devi said, wiping furiously at her eyes. “Always talking nonsense. Avvaiah, she … she … ” Devi swallowed, unable to complete her sentence. She reached for Devanna’s hand, clasping it tightly in her own. “Here,” she said finally, her face drawn, but trying bravely to smile, “I have an idea. Untie this.” She rolled up her sleeve and pointed at the amulet that Muthavva had tied and retied on her over the years, extending the faded black thread as Devi grew. The metal plaque was battered and worn, its Sanskrit inscription rendered almost invisible. Devanna untied it, struggling with the knots.

  “Avvaiah tied this on me when I was a baby. For good luck, she told me. Here.” Placing it in Devanna’s palm, she folded his fingers over the amulet.

  “I can’t take this. It was meant for you.”

  “And I am giving it to you.” Devi smiled tremulously. “I don’t need it anymore.” She rubbed her arm where the amulet had imprinted itself on her skin over the years, the verse inverted. “Avvaiah is there in the clouds with my other ancestors, watching over me.”

  They tilted back their heads, gazing at the clouds as they shifted and chased each other in translucent puffs across the glassy sky. There was a hooked nose; there, the shape of a man’s ear. And if you looked hard enough, there, right there, you could almost see the back of a woman’s head, weighted down with a bunch of sampigé flowers.

  High above them, a solitary heron floated on a thermal, lazily dipping and rising in the breeze.

  Chapter 7

  Quinine,” Gundert said in response to Devanna’s question. “It was powdered quinine. An alkaloid extracted from the cinchona tree. Cinchona succirubra.” Pulling out a slim volume from the bookshelf by his desk, he opened it to a page, its margins covered with notes in his small, meticulous handwriting. “Right here,” Gundert said, gently tapping the yellowed paper. “How to economically extract quinine from cinchona bark. Public knowledge for the very first time, thanks to the largesse of the Government Quinologist in Bengal. Here, read it aloud.”

  “The Calcutta Official Gazette.” Gundert had scattered bits of neem leaf through the periodical to keep the silverfish at bay; naphthalene would have burned through the thin paper. “An oil process for the manufacture of … sul … sulphate of quin … quinine, sulphate of quinine, by C. H. Wood, Quin … Quino … Quino-lo-gist of the Government of Bengal.” Devanna painstakingly began to read the article aloud, stumbling over the unfamiliar words and strings of complicated equations. It was his privilege, Wood wrote, to detail for the first time in known history a practical and commercially viable method for extracting quinine using an oil-based solvent of fusel oil and petroleum. “The alkaloids are extracted from tile bark in a much greater state of purity, so that the final operations for obtaining pure and finished products are much simplified. The whole process of extraction can be performed at common temperatures and the apparatus and appliances required are of a readily available nature…”

  Devanna stopped reading midsentence, inexplicably furious. “I don’t understand this,” he cried. “None of this makes any sense. I … I … ” He paused in frustration, stabbing his finger at the pages.

  Gundert said nothing, just crossed his arms and looked at him. Devanna stared back defiantly, then cheeks red, looked away.

  “It was not your fault,” Gundert said quietly. Devanna’s face twisted, but he remained silent. “Listen to me, Dev,” Gundert continued. “There is nothing you could have done. Maybe if Dr. Jameson had been able to see her, or if I had got there sooner … but even so, who is to say that the quinine would have taken effect, yes? She was very far gone.”

  Devanna swallowed, still not looking at the Reverend. “They say the vaidya cursed her after you came,” he said in a small voice.

  The Reverend sighed and shook his head. “It was no work of demons or curses. Only a tiny mosquito, minuscule in size but lethal in its poison. Malaria, Dev, it was a disease called malaria.”

  He came around the desk and took the paper from Devanna’s hands. “Quinine … You see here? On this page, a cure for millions. All we need is for people to learn, to know how to use these drugs, to know all there is to know about modern medicine.”

  The silence stretched between them. Gundert leaned against the desk, watching his boy. “All that is needed,” he repeated, “is for someone to learn.”

  “I want to learn,” Devanna said, his words tumbling over one another. “Teach me how to make this quinine, teach me all the medicine you know. Please, Reverend, I will do whatever you ask, I will study as hard as anyone can, but I have to learn.”

  “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils Himself in many ways,” Gundert softly quoted. “The Lord sent you to me for a reason, Devanna. You are the one He has chosen to bring this mission and our cause into the next century. I will teach you all I know, I promise, and when you have surpassed me—as you will—use your knowledge for the betterment of your people.” Some days later, Gundert called Devanna into his study. “I wish to share something with you,” he said. “Something of great value to me, and which I think you might enjoy.” Devanna watched curiously as the Reverend took a key from about his neck and unlocked a drawer in his writing bureau.

  “You remember how we talked about the difficulty in classifying the various species of bamboo?”

  Devanna nodded again. The problem was that all species of bamboo looked essentially the same until they flowered. And when they did flower, it was with maddening infrequency, being rendered with a pollination cycle that occurred only once every thirty years or so on average, fifty or sixty in some of the more recalcitrant species. There were probably dozens of species waiting to be discovered in the jungles of India, Java, and Sumatra.

  Gundert took from the drawer a compact package of white silk and placed it carefully upon the desk. When he had first arrived in Coorg, he explained, he had held high hopes of discovering one such species, hitherto unclassified, blooming in the wild. The locals had shaken their heads when he asked them—the bamboo groves had seeded two years ago, they told him, flowered en masse and then died soon after, as was their wont. It would be at least another fifty years before the seedlings they had left in their wake matured. Still, Gundert had not given up hope. Surely there must be plants that did not follow this general time cycle, at least one clump of bamboo somewhere in the jungles or in the hi
lls, perhaps, that was due to flower shortly. The months had passed, however, and when he had neither found nor heard anything that would suggest the existence of such a bamboo, he had reluctantly reconciled himself to the fact that perhaps it would indeed be another five or six decades before a new species could be identified and established beyond doubt.

  Then early one morning, a man was found collapsed in front of the mission gates, burning with fever. Gundert had rushed to examine him and realized from the hide around the stranger’s waist and the necklace of tiny bird bones he wore that he was a Korama tribal. He had heard of the reclusive tribe who lived deep within the jungle, quite unlike the docile Poleyas in their distaste for civilization.

  Devanna nodded intently. He had seen the Koramas, too; they surfaced occasionally in the villages selling hollowed-out gourds filled with tiger blood or peacock fat.

  Gundert had removed the black, poison-tipped arrows from the Korama’s quiver and, calling to the mission staff, had had him moved into the infirmary. He had treated the Korama for his fever, and it was remarkable how quickly the man’s body responded to the most basic medical intervention. Gundert paused and glanced at Devanna. “I made him sweat out the fever,” he explained. “I had the staff rub salt on the soles of the feet and then covered him with as many blankets as we could spare. If that had not worked, I planned to phlebotomize him, but as it turned out, we had no need of leeches.”

  When Gundert was notified the next morning that the Korama was awake, he had asked his usual question: Did the Korama know of any unusual plants that might be of interest to him?

  The man had stared at Gundert with deadened eyes. Yes, he had finally responded, there was such a plant, the most special in all the forests, blooming but once every man life. Groves of it were flowering now, and he would get one of the plants for Gundert. He had left the mission that same afternoon, fully cured.

  Gundert had not been especially hopeful of his return. He was uncertain if the Korama had even understood what he had asked for. Indeed, he had all but forgotten about him when one morning, one of the novices came to Gundert, gingerly bearing a package. It was a monkey’s hide, she told him, her nose wrinkling in distaste. It had been left that morning on the doorstep of the mission.

  The Korama! Gundert unfolded the hide and found a container of roughly woven leaves. Tucked away within it … Gundert glanced at Devanna’s rapt face. “It was large, the circumference of both my palms held together, with a certain waxiness to its petals. It was a perfect specimen, the dew still glistening from its pistil, and with such a fragrance. Sweeter than a rose, richer than jasmine, with the musky underpinnings of an orchid. It perfumed the corridors of the mission for days.”

  “The bamboo flower!” Devanna exclaimed triumphantly.

  “Yes, the bamboo flower, just as the Korama had promised.” Gundert sighed and began to unwrap the white silk. “Unfortunately the Korama himself was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, the flower withered away. Without the mother plant, there was no type to prepare, no specimen to send to the botanical gardens in Bangalore or perhaps even to England.”

  Devanna gazed, fascinated, at the dried flower that the Reverend had uncovered. It was as large as a book. He imagined he could still smell a trace of the perfume that Gundert had alluded to, a heady fragrance just tickling his nose.

  He was still hopeful, Gundert was saying. A flowering bamboo existed, somewhere out there, just waiting to be discovered. “Maybe you, Devanna,” he said, “are the one who will help me find it.”

  Devanna slowly nodded. “What will you name it, Reverend?” he asked.

  Gundert smiled as he carefully packed the flower away. “Bambusa indica olafsen,” he said simply.

  After his friend in the calotype. Devanna was silent for a while, and then he asked, “But what if I find it first?”

  The Reverend laughed and patted his shoulder. “Well, you will be a good student of course and bring it to me, won’t you?” He folded the silk, still chuckling, and placed it back into the drawer.

  I will find it, Devanna silently promised himself, his lip jutting out in determination. And when I do, it shall be named for her and her alone: Bambusa indica devi.

  Chapter 8

  1896

  Mopping her face with the edge of her sari, Devi lifted the iron blowpipe and blew into the flames. Heat bounced off the pot of oil bubbling on the fire, reeds of blue smoke spiraling from its surface. Devi passed her hands over the pot, and heat hammered against her open palms. Grabbing a twist of rag in one hand and wrapping the end of her sari about the other, she hefted the pot off the fire and through the open doors of the kitchen into the courtyard.

  A vat of bitter limes lay waiting outside. She had picked the limes herself, from the two trees that Muthavva had planted years ago by the vegetable patch. The limes had been quartered and tossed with salt, chili powder, sugar, and green peppercorns and then put to cure in the sun a week ago. They had lain there, curling slowly about themselves as the moisture was wrung from their skins, the spices working their way into the rinds. Untying the cheesecloth that covered the wooden mouth of the vat, Devi tipped the smoking oil into its belly. The desiccating limes stretched luxuriously in the hot oil, softening and expanding, a rich braid of smoke and citrus rising from the vat to curl about the courtyard.

  As it cooled, she dipped a finger into the pickle and raised it to her mouth. Salty, sweet, lip-puckeringly perfect. Tayi would have to admit that this time Devi had outdone even her.

  “Ehhh, kunyi. Is this what I have taught you, to stick your inji fingers into the pot? Must we all share the pleasure of your spit?”

  Tayi billowed forth from the house. Devi sat back on her haunches and grinned up at her mischievously. “My sweet-tempered Tayi, I was only tasting it, that’s all. First taste, I promise. Would I risk your wrath by going in a second time with my inji, spit-coated fingers?”

  “Yes, you would,” said Tayi shortly. “Don’t try to charm me now. I am not your father, dancing to your every tune. Get the pickle indoors—it needs to cool completely before it is stored away.”

  “What, Tayi, why do you make so much anger? Here, taste this and tell me if it isn’t the best pickle you have ever had.” Devi dipped the ladle into the pickle and, pulling on Tayi’s hand, dropped a piece of lime onto her palm. Tayi tasted it, still annoyed.

  “It’s all right … not bad,” she admitted grudgingly.

  “Not bad!” Rising to her feet in one fluid, graceful movement, Devi flung her arms about the old lady. “Come on, Tayi, you know your flower bud has outdone herself this time. Come on, say it, say it or I will tickle you! Your flower bud has made the best pickle in the whole world, say it, your sun and moon is the best, your sun and moon… ”

  Tayi tried to hide her smile. “Cheh. What mad behavior is this? Fully eighteen years old, a grown woman now, and still you behave like a silly little girl.” She tugged at Devi’s arms. “Come now, I have a lot of work to do. Stop hugging me like a bear and bring in the pickle. And go see to Tukra—make sure he trusses the chickens properly.”

  Devi shook her head fondly as Tayi bustled back to the kitchen. Poor Tayi. Didn’t she know better than to take what the village gossips said to heart? Yet another marriage proposal had come for Devi last week. Thimmaya, as was his wont, had asked his daughter her opinion. “No,” she had said at once, and he had politely turned it down.

  News had got round the village, and the women had tuttutted. Poor girl, they said piously, yet another suitor spurned. Why wouldn’t her father allow her to get married? Was he so short of help that he should keep his daughter chained to his hearth? Although really, what did anyone expect? A child without a mother was left bereft at the mercy of the father, they sighed. A girl without a mother, like a crop with no rain.

  Devi had grown used to their tongues, and they didn’t slice into her like they once did, but then she had had over four years since her mother’s passing in which to grow a thicker skin. She stir
red the pickle angrily, splattering some of it into the mud. Good-for-nothing gossips. She had told them off at first, telling them to mind their own business, that they knew nothing of her private affairs. “Cheh,” the women clucked, “see how this chit of a girl talks back to us. Then again, what can we expect when there is no mother to teach her any better?”

  Over time, she had learned it was better to ignore them, or at least to hold her head high and shrug her shoulders, pretend that what they said was of no import to her. Their barbs slid off her now, like rainwater slip-sliding from the leaves of the colocasia plant. Still, their comments wounded Tayi deeply. They shielded Thimmaya from the worst of it, Tayi and she, but nevertheless poor Tayi still bristled and wept. Were they dead, too, she lamented to Thimmaya, did they not have Devi’s best interests at heart?

  “Leave it be, Avvaiah,” Thimmaya would say tiredly, “let barking dogs bark. Why do you let them get to you?”

  They had advised Thimmaya to get married again, these self-proclaimed well-wishers. There was a widow in the neighboring village who would suit him well, they suggested. Thimmaya had refused. He was too old, he told them, and all he wanted now was to see his children settled. Ah, they had exclaimed, at least there Iguthappa had favored him. Devi was growing up to be an undoubted beauty; any man would be lucky to call her his wife. They had helpfully inundated the Nachimanda house with proposals, offering up their sons and brothers, their nephews, cousins and cousins’ cousins. Each time, Thimmaya had turned first to Devi and sought her opinion on the proposed match. Each time, Devi had tossed her head and turned the proposals down.

  This past week, spurred on by the women, Tayi had hit upon a new scheme. “Take her with you to Tala Kaveri,” she urged Thimmaya. “Take Devi to the festival.”

  Yet again it was time for the Goddess Kaveri to visit Coorg. Every year, when the rains had ended and the fields were tinged with gold, when fireflies flickered in darkening courtyards and the air was like velvet, when the stars hung so low that the constellation of the seven sages was clearly visible, glittering in the night sky, Kaveri, Mother Goddess, life giver, river most sacred to the Coorgs, visited the temple tank at the top of the Bhagamandala mountain. In exactly the second week of October, at a time precisely calculated by the priests from the movement of the planets and the angle of the sun, she burst forth like clockwork into the temple tank.