Tiger Hills

by Sarita Mandanna

  “He used to say your name,” said the widow, cutting her short.

  Devi went very still. “What?”

  “Machu. He used to say your name.” The eyes she raised were lifeless. “In the nights, in his sleep. Once, even while we … He used to call your name.”

  Devi looked at her, stricken, and the woman laughed humorlessly. “Of course, he never guessed that I knew. Men!

  “So,” the widow continued. “Why are you really here, so many months after my husband has passed away?”

  Devi drew a breath, trying to collect herself. She forced herself to look the widow in the eye. “You’re right,” she said, “I didn’t come here just to offer my condolences. Appu. Why don’t you enroll him in the mission school? It’s the best in Coorg; my own son goes there.” Despite her attempts to appear composed, the words were spilling out nervously, her hands jerking, punctuating the air. “I will, of course, pay all of his tuition. I know the school is too far to travel to from here, but he can stay with me.”

  “You want Appu to … ” The widow threw back her head and laughed, a sound like chalk being dragged across a slate. “So it wasn’t enough that you sank your claws into my husband, now you want our son, too?”

  “Machu was an honorable man! While he was married to you—”

  “While he was married to me, thanks to whatever black magic you spun, he never stopped dreaming of you.” The widow rose abruptly. “I have work to do. You must leave.”

  “Wait!” Devi searched frantically for the right words. “Think of the child. Even on the army pension … ” She gestured toward the dusty table. “I can offer him a much better life than you can.”

  The widow tilted her head and there was something in the gesture that reminded Devi of a cat.

  “Is that so? Well, the school has a hostel, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Why don’t you just pay for my son’s room and board as well, and I can then enroll him there?”

  “No! He needs a home. With me, he will … ”

  The veins stood out on the widow’s forehead, accentuating the gauntness of her face. “This is his home. I am his mother.”

  Devi began to panic, at being caught out so effortlessly. She began talking even faster than before. “He and my other son, they will grow up as brothers. And you could visit whenever you wished.”

  “Of course. He gets a brother, your husband can fill in for his father, and he gets not one, but two mothers. Two mothers fighting over him, making him choose between them. Me, his birth mother, the one he will always remember as having given him up, and you, the saintly surrogate. No. Never.”

  “Please,” Devi said desperately. “This is for Appu’s own good, you cannot give him the life I can. Machu would have wanted this for his son.”

  The widow’s face darkened. “Our son,” she spat. “He is my son, too, don’t you ever forget that. So your money can buy him the life I cannot? Let me tell you something. The means that you speak of with such confidence? It is borrowed land that you till.

  “Oh, come,” she said bitterly, at Devi’s nonplussed expression. “Don’t look so surprised. We both know you are a canny woman. Nari Malai estate, is that not what you have named the land that belonged to my husband? Tiger Hills, for the tiger killer himself ?”

  “It has nothing to do with him.”

  “You’re lying. It has everything to do with him.”

  “No—” Devi began, but then she stopped, the color draining from her face as pieces from the past began at last to fall into place. I will see to it, he had said to her, that you get your share.

  “No,” she whispered, “it cannot be, the elders, it was they who—”

  “The land was his. He insisted that they give it to you. He had the elders concoct the story of the donation to the temple so nobody would know the truth.” The widow sat down abruptly at the table. And then holding her head in her hands, she began to laugh once more.

  “It was his. A hundred acres, and he gave it all to you.”

  Devi sat dazed in the carriage as they headed back toward Mercara, the widow’s awful laughter echoing in her ears. He had given her his land.

  “Nari Malai,” she said abruptly to Tukra. “Drive me there.”

  Tukra turned to look at her in alarm. “Aiyo, it is getting dark, the elephants—”

  “Nari Malai,” she ordered again, her voice rising.

  Telling him to wait for her at the entrance, she opened the gates to the estate. His estate.

  “My roots,” he had said, pointing to all of Coorg laid out before them.

  The wind shifted direction and the horses tossed their manes, whickering softly. Devi walked into the darkening estate.

  His heart lay here, she had always known. Weighted with this black, beloved soil, contoured by the forests, marked permanently by these hills. Your heart is here, you would wither away anywhere else.

  And yet he had signed away his land to her. “What did you go and do?” she whispered in anguish. He need never have joined the army, had it not been for her demanding Devanna’s share of the Kambeymada assets; he might still have been alive. Right here, walking this very piece of land.

  The evening mist was rolling in, clouding the surrounding mountains and wreathing the path in gray. She stubbed her foot against an exposed tree root, faltered, walked on. A full moon was rising, casting a slanted sheen upon the mist. She moved deeper into the estate, navigating by instinct rather than sight. At last she stopped, in the heart of the silent plantation.

  “Machu,” she cried. “Machu!”

  The mist moved closer, slipping through the coffee, wrapping itself around her. “Machu, I know you must … your roots, your heart is here.” She stood and waited, but there was only silence in reply. “Machu,” she called again, casting about her in the mist-shrouded estate. A chill rain began to fall. “You … without you … ” The rain dripped down, gumming her hair to her scalp, forming rivulets down her back. “I know you are here,” she said despairingly. “I know.” Falling to her knees, closing her fists about the damp earth, his earth, digging her nails deep, deep, as far as they could go into the black, loamy soil, Devi began to weep.

  It was Nanju who saw them approaching the Mercara house a couple of days later. “Avvaiah,” he called, “look!” He pointed to the two figures, barely visible through the rain as they made their way to the door. The water whipped at them, slashing down hard, but the widow refused to enter the house. “You promise to give him his birthright?” she asked cryptically, but Devi knew exactly what she meant.

  Nanju peeped curiously around his mother’s sari. The widow had her arm around the boy’s shoulders. Nanju couldn’t see his face; he was wearing a slit-open gunny sack across his head and over his back to protect him from the rain. “Nanju, go inside,” Devi ordered, and reluctantly he withdrew indoors.

  She turned to the widow. “Yes,” she said, careful not to stare at the boy, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I promise.”

  “I entrust him to you. You take care of him now or else … ”

  “Come visit,” Devi said, the brightness in her tone sounding false even to her own ears. “Whenever you want.”

  The widow gave a veiled smile that did not reach her eyes. “Appu will never have to choose between us.”

  She dropped to her knees and hugged her son to her, stroking his head, whispering endearments into his ear. Then pushing him gently into the house, she turned and disappeared into the rain.

  Devi shut the door with hands that shook. She stood transfixed, still not believing what had just transpired, staring blindly at the door and the whorls in its grain. Slowly, she turned, very slowly, as if not yet certain that this wasn’t a dream. Appu was silent, his eyes wide with apprehension. He has your eyes, Machu. Something began to stir within Devi, a breeze hitherto dormant. Hot, primal, a love born of jungle caverns and animal mothers. Not merely the love she bore toward Nanju, no matter how deeply that ran, but a fierce, tender, erupting love, uncoil
ing from her navel and toward this child. Gently she untied the sack from around his neck, carefully picking apart each knot. “Will you have some hot milk?” she asked.

  He stuck his thumb into his mouth in response.

  “Come,” she said, “I will give you some milk, hot-hot, my kunyi will enjoy it … ”

  Appu turned toward the door, as if assessing the absence of his mother. His beautiful tawny eyes welled with tears.

  “Now, now.” Devi picked him up in her arms. “Aren’t you a big boy?” He nodded miserably. “Then why the tears? Big boys don’t cry, do they?” She kissed his cheek, hugging him close.

  Later that evening, after the children had been put to bed, when Nanju heard Appu crying into his pillow, he rolled over to pat him on the shoulder. “Don’t cry,” he said earnestly. “My Avvaiah is very nice. She’ll take care of you, you’ll see. We’re to be brothers now, she told me. Brothers! Go to sleep, and in the morning I’ll show you my toys.”

  The widow had the last say in the matter after all, ensuring in one fell swoop that while Appu would be provided for as she never could for him, she would always have the upper hand. They found her three days later, washed ashore in a paddy field, her body bloated and foul with gas. The cremation was a hurried affair, the corpse bursting with a loud pop on the funeral pyre.

  Devi said nothing when she heard about the suicide, drawing Appu into her lap, her arms tight about him as she rocked him back and forth. Her horror and guilt over the widow’s suicide turning now to anger at the other’s actions, such cowardice, then back to shock and pity. She looked at the child, trying to steady her breathing and it hit her then, with visceral force. He was hers. Appu was hers at last.

  Poor soul, people tut-tutted over the widow. She had always been so much in love with her husband, she had never been able to be apart from him. His long absences in the army had been hard enough on her, and his death had been just too much to accept. She had leaped to her death, from a rickety bridge over the Kaveri. What a goddess, people said of her, deified on the altar of love.

  Devi kept her counsel, but despite having sole claim over Appu now, their words rankled. Devanna could read the heartache in her eyes. It is easy for the dead, they railed, it is the living who suffer the ache of loss.

  Many years ago at the mission school, Reverend Gundert had told them the story of Christ and his supreme sacrifice. The entire class had been silent, enraptured by the images he conjured of Christ bleeding and transfixed on the cross, all except for Devanna, who had sat there, troubled. “Yes, Dev?” the Reverend had asked. “Do you have a question?”

  “It`s just … what about Mary? What happened to her after Christ sacrificed himself ?”

  He still remembered the expression that had crossed the Reverend’s face, how bereft he had suddenly appeared. “Ah, Dev,” he said softly, “it is only a few who ask that question. What about Mary indeed? The ones who pass on suffer but briefly; it is those they leave behind who must truly bear the weight of the cross.”

  Chapter 28

  1913

  Nanju! Where have you disappeared to? Ayy, Nanju!”

  Devi turned, exasperated, from the kitchen door. “This boy! Where does he keep wandering off to? Rambling around goodness knows where. Fourteen years old, whiskers beginning to sprout on his face, and still he has no sense of time at all.”

  Appu was lounging against the window, engaged with a huge brass seer measure of milk. “He’s probably somewhere close,” he said, cheerfully jumping to Nanju’s defense. “The piglets, maybe he went to check on them.”

  Devi pursed her lips, but before she could say anything more, he slammed the empty measure with a thunk on the sill and belched. “Cheh,” Devi chided, tugging his ear. “Is this what I have taught you, to make these rude noises?”

  Appu forced a deliberate belch through his throat again and grinned.

  “Donkey child.” Devi shook her head, amused in spite of herself. “Go find Nanju,” she said, smoothing the thick spring of hair back from his forehead. “Take him his milk. And don’t you drink it,” she added, “you’ve had quite enough already.”

  Appu strolled into the vegetable garden. Tukra had killed a bandicoot rat that morning, by the drumstick tree. It had been huge, the size of a suckling pig. Appu looked around hopefully as he skirted the pumpkin pit, but there were no more rats to be seen. Vaguely disappointed, he whistled at the dogs tethered in the kennels. They cocked sleepy eyes at him, wagging desultory tails. He took a sip of milk and ambled on, behind the chicken coop and the cattle shed, emptied now of the cattle that had been taken to pasture. He poked his head over the wall of the sty, sending the piglets into a squealing, curling-whirling frenzy of excitement. He took another sip of milk, whistling at the old sow lying on her side, and she grunted softly. Where was Nanju?

  Ah, he thought, the birdhouse. He headed into the plantation, through the coffee bushes that surrounded the bungalow.

  The birdhouse lay a little way into the estate, by the side of the massive stump of a jackfruit tree. Appu sauntered down the rough trail that led to it, thinking wistfully about the elephants. It was because of them, really, that the birdhouse had been built.

  A herd of them had run amok through the estate two summers ago, drawn by the scent of ripening jackfruit. They came at night, crashing about the plantation as the workers trembled in their shacks and the dogs barked futilely. They circled the jackfruit trees, this way and that, as they reached with their trunks for the spiky, pendulous fruit, and in the process ended up trampling scores upon scores of coffee bushes. Appu had thought it was all rather thrilling, but Devi had cursed the elephants long and hard. She hired watchmen to stand guard at the perimeter of the estate where it abutted the forest, arming them with rifles. “Unload them into the air at first sight,” she ordered. How Appu had begged her—Avvaiah, PLEASE—to let him stand guard with them, but she would have none of it. He frowned as he remembered.

  At first it appeared as if the watchmen had succeeded. The elephants lumbered away at the sound of the guns, ears flapping in fright. For the next few nights, the men stood guard, but of the elephants there was no sign. It was not a week later, however, that following Friday, to be exact, that the watchmen were waylaid. It had been their weekly day off, and a host of them were returning drunk and merry from the shanty. The elephants had stood in the middle of the road, the terrified workers told Devi later, like the minions of Ganesha the Elephant God himself. Mammoth ears, like the fronds of some monstrous palm tree, flapping to and fro, massive tusks gleaming as they raised their trunks up high and trumpeted into the sky. Devi had spotted Nanju and Appu then, listening openmouthed from behind the door. “Go inside,” she had said to them sharply. “At once.”

  It was Tukra who filled them in on the details later. The elephants had charged the workers, goring two of them to death and flinging three more into the rain ditch that flanked the road.

  Devi tried talking sense into the workers. What had happened was tragic. However, she pointed out, elephant encounters happened all the time in these parts. It was bound to happen with the estate lying as close as it did to the jungle. No, shivered the survivors, this was no chance encounter. It was retribution, precise and pointed. How had the elephants known to target only those of the party who had stood guard in the estate? They refused to stand guard any longer, and nothing she said could sway them.

  She had barbed wire installed, reinforced with sharpened bamboo and broken glass. The next morning, the elephant tracks spoke for themselves. The beasts had uprooted two athi trees that bordered the fence. When the trees fell, they had dragged a section of the fence down with them. The elephants had then calmly crossed once more into the estate. Before leaving, they had left Devi a parting gift—tracts of trampled coffee bushes, wrenched from the soil and flung contemptuously aside.

  She knew when to concede defeat. She had the workers cut down the jackfruit, every single one. Some fruit she bade them take home to their fami
lies. Twelve of the fattest she saved for the pantry, a few to be set out at teatime with honey, some to be made into jam, and the rest to be julienned, sun-dried, and then crisped golden in hot oil and tossed with salt and red chili powder. The majority of the fruit she had heaped in piles by the side of the estate. It was a conciliatory gesture that the elephants seemed to accept; by the next morning, the fruit was gone. Devi nodded with satisfaction as she surveyed the mess they had left behind, of stubbled green jackfruit skin, seeds, and chunks of unripe fruit. “Burn this mess,” she ordered the workers. “And now that the elephants know there is no more fruit to be had, cut down the jackfruit trees, every last one of them.”

  That afternoon, the boys had returned from school to the crash of timber. Appu had hurried at once toward the sound, Nanju but a footstep behind. Appu watched spellbound as the workers sawed back and forth, the sweat running down their backs, two men to a tree. “Ayy,” he called, eyes shining. “Here, let me have a go as well.”

  When Nanju, however, saw the trees trembling under the assault, and the sticky ooze of sap from their torn bark, he had turned pale. He backed slowly away from the workers, his ears filled with the awful groaning the trees made as they crashed to the ground. Turning abruptly, he had raced toward the house. “Nanju,” Appu had called, surprised, “where are you going?” He had started to follow him, but just then another tree had fallen. With a whoop of excitement, he had turned back to the workers. “Didn’t you hear me? Give me the saw, let me have a go!”

  Devi had looked up in surprise as Nanju burst into the kitchen. “What is it?” she asked. “Why has your face become small as a rat’s?”

  “The trees,” Nanju mumbled. “I … I don’t like to see them fall.”

  Devi turned back to stirring the jam. “It’s necessary, kunyi,” she said, amused. “Do you want the elephants to return next season?”

  “They look … the trees look like old men being cut down.”