“Mine?”
Devi laughed again. “Yes, my slow-thinking son, yours, all yours. See here, this is your name, is it not, at the top of the papers?”
“But … Tiger Hills?”
She shook her head, still smiling. “What of it?”
“Tiger Hills, Avvaiah. This estate. What … I’m the older son.”
“Yes, of course. Which is why you get the larger property. Six hundred acres, monae. I even had a soil sampling done, very good they tell me, the coffee will—”
“No, Avvaiah. Give this to Appu.”
“What is this nonsense? Do you know how hard your Avvaiah has searched to find you this? This is the best property that has come on the market in years, the shade trees are excellent, and look at its size. With six hundred acres, a person could—”
“I don’t want six hundred acres. Not six hundred, not even ten thousand, all I have ever wanted is Tiger Hills. Give this to Appu, buy him two more if you want, but Tiger Hills … Tiger Hills is mine.”
“Kunyi, what is this? Tiger Hills is Appu’s.
“It goes to Appu,” she repeated, distressed when he said nothing. “Tiger Hills has to be Appu’s.”
“Like breathing.” The words were barely audible and Devi wasn’t sure she had heard correctly at first. “Like breathing,” he said again, staring at the title deed in his hands. “This estate, even as a boy … This land, it’s like breathing for me, Avvaiah.” He looked helplessly at his mother. “Appu will never love it as much as I do, you know he won’t.”
“In the name of all the Gods. Nanju, please. Don’t make matters difficult.” The memory of Machu’s widow rose unbidden in her mind. You promise to give Appu his birthright? the woman had asked.
“Tiger Hills goes to Appu, it has to. Look, just look at this property I bought you. Six hundred acres. It is much larger than Tiger Hills. You ought to be bursting with joy!”
“Thank you, Avvaiah,” he said then. “Tiger Hills … thank you,” he repeated heavily. Bending down, Nanju touched his mother’s feet.
Devi bit her lip, unsettled by the exchange. “Swami kapad. God grant my son all happiness. And now that you have a property with which to support a wife, I’m going to find you one. Someone really lovely, really good, nobody but the best for my son.”
He looked at her, a strange, tight smile on his lips. “As lovely as Baby?” he asked.
Devi was more disturbed than she cared to acknowledge by what Nanju had said; so much so that she went the very next day to visit Tayi.
“Kunyi, please stop. You make me dizzy.” Tayi feebly patted the side of the cot. “Come sit.”
Devi ignored the summons, although she halted her pacing to stand by the window. She glared at the chickens pecking in the mud. “Not one word from Appu, Tayi. Is he all right? When is he coming home? Nothing. Has he no concern for Baby? And I am his mother. Does he not understand how I must worry?”
Two of the hens got into a tussle with one another in a loud screeching and squawking, and Devi banged on the window bars. “Shoo!” she shouted. “Shoo!” They subsided with a disgruntled puffing of their feathers. She turned to Tayi, suddenly frightened. “He … he will return, won’t he? Appu will come home, won’t he?”
Tayi sighed. “Of course he will.” She patted the side of the bed again. “Sit.”
Talking with Tayi had lent her some modicum of comfort, but nonetheless, Devi remained upset on her way back to Tiger Hills. She raised a hand to the tiger brooch, running her fingers absently over its smoothness. Maybe it had been a mistake after all, sending the boy abroad. She knew, she knew with a mother’s instinct, that he was getting up to no good there. All these white girls, she thought uncharitably, no thought of maryadi. No sense of what was proper, and what was not. Appu was betrothed, was he not? And still they must be making eyes at him …
The car rounded a bend and the valley below came into view. The paddy was growing, a brilliant green fuzz over the soil. Herons skimmed the crab pools; all around, the emerald hills.
These are my roots, Machu had said to her, when they had stood looking out over Coorg from the Bhagamandala peak. And still he had given her his land. She stared unhappily out of the window. Tiger Hills had always been Appu’s. How had Nanju ever assumed it would go to him?
Like breathing, Nanju had said to her, that was what being at Tiger Hills felt like to him. Her normally reticent child had suddenly turned into a poet.
A heron took solitary wing, floating from the fields in a spool of purest white. Devi watched its flight, gripped by melancholy.
To love so fully, to be so completely immersed in someone or something, yes, that love ran deep; it could feel as natural as breathing. But what Nanju did not yet know was that there was a deeper dimension to such love. A rootedness brought alive only by loss.
“Love is breath, yes, but also what follows after, when all breath is done, when all that remains is silence. Love is water, yearning for the sea. It is the tree that must remain rooted while reaching for the sky. It is shadow, freighted with absence, the recesses where joy blossoms no more.
“Love is what endures, through the years, the bastard aftermath of a loss I cannot even mourn as my own.”
The car turned another bend. The heron soared, banked, flew on.
Chapter 37
Appu tilted his head and looked at the sky. Here in Berlin, the stars seemed distant, out-dazzled by the lights of the city.
There had been an air of suppressed excitement about Stassler all that evening. They had first met for drinks in the lobby of the Blue Velvet and had then proceeded to the cabaret. Midway through the evening, Stassler had leaned forward and whispered in Appu’s ear. “You must come with me afterward.”
Appu gazed thoughtfully at him. Stassler’s eyes had seemed to bulge even more than usual, a vein swelling on the side of his forehead. He shook his head, as he drew on his reefer, swallowing a mouthful of smoke. “Not tonight, Ellen is tired.”
“Not Ellen. Only you. You must.”
Despite himself, Appu was curious. He took another drag of the reefer, feeling his lungs expand. “And where are we going?”
“You must come” was all Stassler said again.
Appu was even more mystified at the end of the show when he realized Stassler had invited along only two others from their party: Henrik and Gustav, a flamboyant fashion plate of a couple, both with startlingly perfect skin. Henrik looked about them as they headed away from the Dormendstrasse and down one of the lesser-known alleys.
“So where is this dashing new club then, Jürgen?” he asked.
“Ahead,” Stassler mumbled.
“Well, slow down a little, won’t you, my pretty?” Henrik said. “The heels on these shoes are entirely too high for such abuse.”
Gustav laughed gently, but Stassler said nothing and hurried along.
Appu ambled beside them, listening with only half an ear to Henrik prattle on about the show that evening. He looked dreamily about him, the reefers he had smoked all evening filling his lungs. Such lights there were in this city. Green … yellow … blue, red, orange, and colors he did not even know the names of, diffusing from the streetlamps and the cabarets, reflected from the earrings of the women—men?—who passed by. Appu raised a hand and it seemed translucent, the bones jointed in a webbing of color.
They walked on, turning down this alleyway and that. Appu noticed that the lights swirling about him were slowly dimming. Still they walked, down increasingly quieter streets. There were no clubs here—in fact, now that Appu thought about it, it was awfully deserted. They turned yet another corner, and he was filled with a fierce longing for another reefer.
“Stassler,” he began irritably, “where in God’s name—” Then he saw them.
About fifty paces ahead, four or five figures were standing under an unlit streetlamp, waiting. Appu shook his head, trying to clear it. No, it was no mistake, those men in the shadows ahead were watching out for something.
“Stop,”
he hissed. “I don’t like this.”
Henrik and Gustav huddled together, suddenly nervous. “Stassler?”
“Come on!” Stassler cried then, his voice harsh. His hands flew in the air, beckoning to the waiting men. “Over here!”
Appu stood frozen as the figures peeled themselves from the shadows, one, two, another, then two more, and charged toward them. They were shouting something, but he couldn’t make out their words. Henrik screamed in fright, or was it Gustav? The useless pattering of their heels as they tottered back up the street.
“Get them,” Stassler was screaming at Appu, his mouth twisted with hatred. “Don’t let them get away.”
Appu raised his fists drunkenly, still not understanding, but the men were already streaming past him. He stood like that for an instant, fists bunched in front of him, then turned, watching, as if in a dream, as they overtook the two flamboyants. He saw them fall, Henrik-Gustav-Henrik, hard to tell who was who, a muddle of shrieking silk and velvet. The tshack-tshack sound of fists, marring that pampered skin. A picture floated into his head, of the goat meat that hung from hooks in the butcher’s shop at Mercara. Great slabs of flesh, skinless, colored red and purple, such vivid colors, marbled with creamy veins of fat. Tshack-tshack-tshack, the sound of fists hitting skin, like meat being pounded.
They were screaming for help. “Dags! Bitte Bitte, mein Gott, Bitte.”
One of the men pulled out a vicious-looking trench and began laying into the figures. Stassler had run over as well, and was laughing as he kicked ferociously at the two shapes on the ground.
Still Appu stood frozen.
“Dags.”
The cry was feebler now. He could hear an awful crunch, bones being broken. A dark stain was spreading from the bodies, red, or black or maroon, he couldn’t tell, seeping into the street.
Appu turned on his heel and ran, ran for his life, away from Stassler and the Hitler Youth.
He was shaking when he reached the Blue Velvet, the coins slipping through his fingers as he tried to tip the doorman. Ellen had fallen asleep. He sat trembling on the sofa and, uncorking the decanter of brandy, downed its contents.
Dags. Bitte, Dags.
He should have done something, he should have done something. He tilted the decanter to his throat again, but it was empty. It was not your place. It was not. This is not your problem, this isn’t your home.
He stared at Ellen, as if seeing her for the very first time. What was he doing here? He looked at the tautness of a thigh flung across the bedclothes, the thin blue veins that lay in the hollow of a knee. How tawdry she seemed. So easily had.
He shut his eyes, willing away the horror of the evening, and Baby’s face floated suddenly in his mind. Appu thought of his waiting fiancée, was reminded of the bone-jolting beauty of her. Pristine, so pure. The certainty that no man had ever feasted his eyes upon her thighs, that no man other than he ever would.
Dragging open his trunk, he began to pack, throwing in piles of smoking jackets, shoes, shirts, bow ties and felt hats, whatever came to hand.
Ellen awoke, startled by the noise. “Dags?” she asked woozily. “Dags?” she asked again, her voice now high with alarm. “What’s going on? What … Where are you going?”
Her mascara had smudged along one cheek, giving her the look of a frightened clown. “Dags! Whatever is the matter? Why aren’t you saying anything? Please, Dags, where are you going?”
“Home, darling,” Appu said, without even looking at her. “Home.”
Chapter 38
Mist swam up the sides of the hills, blanketing the mourners. A three-legged stool had been placed in the center of the courtyard. It too was wreathed in gray. A brass plate rested upon the stool, heaped with raw rice harvested from the Nachimanda fields; atop the rice, the flame from a gleaming brass lamp flickered and dipped as if in time to the dirge. The drums beat slowly, wistfully, as the Poleya funeral dancers, arms entwined, undulated in a circle about the stool. Now appearing, now vanishing, treading in and out of the fog.
A reed mat had been woven by the village mat maker especially for the funeral. It had been laid upon the floor of the verandah, and the women of the house sat here, their hair unbound and hanging to their waists, yards of white muslin draped and knotted about their shoulders. Gravely, in time with the drums, the funeral singers sang the requiem.
You are ruined, Tayavva, ruined like never before
The loss you suffered, Tayavva
O! What a terrible loss
You are defeated, Tayavva, defeated like never before.
Devi sat as if carved from marble, barely, it seemed, even breathing.
Tukra kept pace with the drums. He seemed to dance instinctively, not really listening to the throbbing beat. His face was contorted with grief, his features blurred and running into one another; whether this was from the mist or the film over her eyes, Devi was not certain.
He had insisted on dancing at the funeral, even though his wife had warned him it would not be easy on his knees. “You’re old now; leave the funeral dance to the young,” she had counseled, but he had been adamant. “It’s for Tayi,” he had wept, “Tayi.” He circled the lamp now, one step forward, one step back, the voices of the singers washing over the mourners and the somber hills.
Like the Lord’s seven strings of gold beads
Snapped and scattered, Tayavva
So too you have snapped
Just as His looking glass
Slipped from his hand and shattered, Tayavva
O! So too are you shattered, Tayavva.
Devi stared at the corpse lying on the verandah. They had washed the body that morning and wrapped it in white. She had stoppered the nostrils, earlobes, and slack belly button with plugs of cotton; a gold sovereign gleamed from the center of the wide forehead.
Just as His golden needle
Broke at its eye, at its eye, Tayavva
O! So too are you broken, Tayavva.
Tayi was lying there. Tayi. Her Tayi. Gone. First Avvaiah, then Machu, then Appaiah, and now Tayi. A great weight settled on her, like a millstone rocking slowly upon her chest, constricting her lungs. Devi rose to her feet and stumbled into the house.
It lay quiet and deserted. The hearth would not be lit for eleven days after Tayi was … after the cremation. Devi stood facing the soot-darkened walls.
Devi kunyi. Flower bud! Here, a hot otti. The high-pitched, care free sound of a child’s laughter. She started, but it was nothing, nobody. Ghosts from the past.
A story, Tayi, tell me a story.
A story is it, my sun and moon? Well, let us see now…It is said that years ago, many, many years ago, before the Kaveri temple was built, when the mighty trees of the forest were still curled upon themselves in dormant seed, there was a great war. It was waged over a king’s daughter, the most beautiful princess you ever did see. Yes, my flower bud, just like you.
Such a war was fought, the likes of which our people had never seen. When it was over, our brave lay unmoving upon the battlefield, their eyes open to the skies, and our queens had vanished into smoke. It is said that our people fled then, the few who remained, leaving behind the rocks and golden sands, stained now by pillage and carrion. And that when they left, there sounded an unearthly sigh, like a gust of cold wind. It traveled the length of the battlefield and blew past the smoldering remains of the fort, and the sky grew dark with cloud.
Far they traveled, down rivers, through the plains and steaming jungles, shadowed always by the sorrowing clouds, until at last they halted in wonder. Such a land lay before their eyes. A land of sparkling waters and shaded hills, a place of fruit and milk and honey. They stood there marveling, at the edge of the hills, when a maiden appeared before them. “Halt,” she said, and her voice was like the murmuring of a brook. She was Kaveri, she said, the caretaker of the hills, and none might pass without her command. She heard their story then, of the terrible war just waged, and she tilted her head, her tresses flowing like water.
“You may stay,” she said, “in this incomparable land, but first, you must promise me something. Every year, when I emerge anew into this world from the Bhagamandala mountain, you must be there to greet me. Float flowers and coconuts into my waters, and in return I will give this land to you for all time. I shall flow through your holdings in rivers of sweet-fleshed fish and fat black river crabs. I shall water your fields, filling them with brooks and puddles that shall host the graceful, white-winged birds of your birth land. I shall tumble through these hills in a thousand waterfalls and see to it always that the forest teems with life.”
Our people promised the beautiful maiden that they would do as she said. She smiled, and it was like the sun shining through a stream. “Yours shall be a blessed race,” she said, “a pearl-like race of valiant men and women of honor. May your fields be always ripe with grain, may your flowers always bloom.”
She looked at them. “Why do you still look so sad?”
They told her then, of the dead, of all those left behind. Her eyes grew tender, and they were the color of a shaded jungle pool. She pointed a finger to the skies, and lightning flashed through the clouds. “Your veera shall live on. In the skies, in evening mists, in the shadows behind the trees. Your ancestors,” she said in blessing, “shall watch over you forever.”
There was a great sigh at her words, like the gusting of a breeze. The clouds above their heads parted, and shadows flitted through the trees. The leaves on the trees rustled, despite there being no wind, and then once more, there was silence. When they turned back to the maiden, she had vanished.
They settled here, our forefathers, in this land of sparkling water and open skies. And now and again, it is said, when the clouds part and the rain falls like silver, now and again, the veera step forth from the shadows to take root among us once more.
The drums continued to beat outside. Devi stood silent as a statue, the white of her sari and her skin seeming almost to shimmer in the dim light, her hair curling about her shoulders.
Tiger Hills Page 40