Tiger Hills

by Sarita Mandanna

  The next year, when Appu’s twenty-seventh birthday came around, Devi made an offering at the Iguthappa temple in the name of all three children—Appu, Baby, and Nanju. Appu sat on one enormous pan of the balancing scale, pulling a blushing Baby onto his lap, as the priest loaded up the corresponding pan with sack upon sack of raw rice. Devi folded her hands in prayer, watching as the two pans of the scale were finally in perfect balance. “Iguthappa Swami, protect my children.”

  They donated the rice to the temple, and Devi gave an additional hundred rupees to the priest. “Pray for my sons,” she asked, “both of them … let them both be home.”

  She was in a pensive mood on the way back to Tiger Hills, barely noticing as the car bumped along the pitted roads. Appu, who was driving the car ahead, slowed, pulled to the side, and flagged them down. When Devi rolled down the window, he pointed to his left. “The Kambeymada village, Avvaiah. I told our lady here that it lies along this road, and she wants to visit the old Kambeymada house.”

  Devi was about to point out that it was getting late when Baby leaned across Appu, her eyes shining. “May we?” she asked, “Please, just for a short while, I promise we won’t be long.”

  “Oh, all right,” Devi capitulated. “The two of you go. No, not us, it’s late and we’re tired.”

  Devi sat at her dressing table that evening, combing out her damp hair. It was hard to believe how long it had been since she had last visited the Kambeymada house. Appu and Devanna went each year for the Puthari celebrations, but she refused to go. The house, its grounds … there were too many memories.

  She put down the comb, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She touched a finger to the hollows under her eyes. When had these appeared? She shut her eyes, suddenly weary. The ceremony at the temple had upset her more than she realized. Nanju should have been there. And then, this visit of Appu’s to the Kambeymada house. It had immediately brought up memories of the past, rocking her already fragile mood.

  An image swam before her, of yellow laburnums glowing against a bald turquoise sky. She sat still for a moment, trying to gather herself, and then reached unhappily for the tiger claw brooch. It lay in her palm, a smooth, worn comma gleaming faintly in the dusk. Tiredly, she pinned it to her sari, and then, raising the comb, began once more to untangle her hair.

  She heard the honking of the car, the lights from its headlamps flaring through the windows as it swept up the drive. Appu and Baby were back. Devi twisted her hair into a knot and slowly headed downstairs. Appu was unlacing his shoes on the verandah, grinning as Baby excitedly showed Devanna a large frame.

  “Avvaiah, see what we found. My lovely wife,” Appu explained, “discovered this in the attic. Only she, of course, would even think of scampering up to the attic, but there you have it.”

  “I went up, just to have a look, and there it was, lying against a wall,” Baby explained. “Right at the very back, covered in dust. One of the old men in the house, he remembered that it had been put there years ago. It was meant to be reframed, he told me, soon after Kambeymada Nayak passed away. But then, with the division of the property and so on, everyone somehow forgot about it.”

  “It’s a family photograph, Avvaiah,” Appu said. “Here, see for yourself.”

  “A photo … ?” Devi’s heart skipped a beat. She sat on the sofa next to Devanna, pushing her glasses onto the bridge of her nose. It was an old sepia print. White ants and termites had burrowed into the rickety black frame. From under the clouded glass, faces from the past stared solemnly back at her.

  “Mysore,” she said, her voice tight. “Kambeymada Nayak had brought a photographer from Mysore.”

  So many years, Machu. She raised a hand to the frame, a slight tremor in her fingers as she traced the figures that lay silent beneath the glass. One by one, saving the face she most longed for until last.

  “Look.” Baby was less patient. “Here you are, with Nanju anna.”

  He had slipped so easily from her. One push, then another, and there he lay, at the edge of the straw mattress. Such little fingers, such perfectly formed feet. Such a good child, they said of him, hardly even cries, doesn’t want to trouble his mother at all.

  Devi reached toward the slender young woman and the round-faced toddler who sat on her lap. How young she had been. “Such a sweet-natured child, he was,” she said to Baby. “Hardly cried, always smiling… ” Devanna said nothing, but she knew, even without looking at him, that he, too, was finding it very hard not to cry.

  Devi began to point out the others to Appu and Baby, choked with emotion. “Here. Kambeymada Nayak. Your great-grandfather, Appu. What a mustache he had!”

  “And him?” Baby pointed at a man standing in the very last row. “So tall—this is Appu’s father, is it not? It has to be, Appu looks so much like him.”

  Devi’s eyes lifted to where Baby was pointing.

  Your face. To rest my eyes just once more upon your face.

  “He … ” She stopped, trying to regain her composure. “Look, monae,” she said then to Appu, trying desperately to sound lighthearted, “didn’t I always tell you that you look just like him?”

  Baby twisted the photograph toward her. Only Devanna noticed the involuntary twitch of protest as Devi tried to hold on to the frame.

  Baby stared at the photograph. “How strange.” She turned it around again so the others could see what she meant. “Appu’s father. He isn’t looking at the camera at all. Why—” She peered at Machu’s face, then she laughed and looked up at Devi. “The way this photograph has been taken, it almost seems as if he is staring straight at you!”

  Devi began to cry then, tears rolling from her eyes. Appu looked at her, startled, and shuffled his feet as Devanna dug his hand into his pocket and quietly handed her his handkerchief.

  They had the photograph reframed with a square of new glass and hung it in the drawing room. Every morning now, on her way to the garden, Devi stopped to touch her fingers to Machu’s face. The grim, worn cast of it, his eyes contriving to be at once dark with anger and yet hollowed with unhappiness as they stared not at the photographer, but at the back of her head.

  Such things I said to you that day. Half a man. I called you half the man you were. How angry I made you. And then you went and won the paaria kali match…

  She would stand there, reliving the past—all these years, so many years, Machu—drinking in that beloved, long-lost face as the plantation stirred and the mist swirled dreamily about the garden.

  The photograph was a sign, Devi knew. She felt it in her bones. It was a good omen, an indication that the family would soon be together again. Sitting on Nanju’s bed one afternoon, she came to an abrupt decision. This was foolishness. All this drama over nothing. She would wait until next year. Until the Puthari festival, no longer. If this donkey son of hers had not returned by then, she would send for him. Why, maybe they could all go to Bombay together, make a visit of it. I will twist his ear hard, she promised herself, and smack him on that stubborn forehead of his. And then I will bring him home.

  It was as if a weight had lifted from her chest. Devi was smiling as she shut the door of the room behind her.

  “Ayy, old man,” she said to Devanna the next morning, as they sat on the verandah. “No need to be so forlorn. Just you wait and see, I will bring your son home.” Devanna looked at her quizzically, and she nodded. Then, cocking her head to one side, Devi began to sing. On and on she sang, as tunelessly as ever, waggling her eyebrows comically and stopping only when Devanna at last began to laugh.

  There arrived one more letter from Nanju, this time containing not a word. It was an unsettling, single page of foolscap covered entirely with tracings of the amulet that Devanna had given him. It was if he had placed the paper over it and run his pencil furiously across. Right side up, upside down, horizontal, vertical, along this side of the page and that, tracing after tracing of the rounded rectangle shape of the amulet and the prayer it contained. Devanna stared at the
strange letter, his face pinched. “It’s nothing,” Devi said to him, trying to mask her own worry. “He was probably at a loss for what to write.” She smoothed the unsettling drawings under her fingers. “We’ll go to Bombay,” she said decisively. “Let the rains be done, we’ll all go to Bombay and bring Nanju home.”

  Baby believed she was pregnant again. This time, she did not tell Appu in case it was yet another false alarm. A full week passed, and still she hugged the news to herself. Her legs seemed to grow more leaden with each passing day, and there was a strange cotton-fuzz taste in her mouth, yet Baby didn’t say a word.

  “Are you well?” a concerned Devi asked, noting the pallor of her face. Baby nodded, trying to smile, but the ache in her legs grew so severe that finally that afternoon she took to her bed, drawing the blankets as close as possible. Her head felt heavy, so unbearably heavy. She shifted this way and that, trying to get comfortable, and at last fell into a fitful sleep, a hand draped across her stomach. Almost immediately she began to dream.

  She found herself tiptoeing through a large building, careful not to wake any of the people in the series of dank, dimly lit rooms. Someone moaned, and Baby realized that the building was a hospital. The person moaned again. “Avvaiah,” he whispered, and a pang shot through her as she recognized Nanju’s voice. He moved gingerly and grimaced in pain. “Avvaiah,” he repeated, stopping short, as if embarrassed that someone might hear. He lay there, a look of such unbearable hurt in his eyes that Baby wanted to cry. It was as if she could feel it herself, the crushing weight of his despair. He sat up, wincing. She watched helplessly as he lowered his feet to the floor, shuffled past her, and disappeared through the door.

  Baby awoke in a sweat; she lay there for an instant, her heart racing. So vivid had the dream been that it took a few seconds for her to register the dampness that lay pooling between her thighs. “No!” She panicked, all thoughts of Nanju dashed from her head. She knew, she knew, even before she thrust her hand downward and her fingers came back murky with blood.

  Devi sighed as she sorted through the post. Two days now since Baby had taken to her bed. Once again the monthly blood had come; the child had been so crushed that she had developed an alarmingly high fever. How the poor girl had wept. “It’s okay, kunyi,” Devi had consoled her, masking her own disappointment. “Hush now, it isn’t as if the mountains have fallen or the Kaveri run dry. It is not the end of the world. I’m sure that next month … ” But still Baby had wept, as if her heart would break. A distressed Appu kept pacing the bedroom, back and forth, back and forth, until Devi had practically had to order him downstairs.

  She looked absently up at the ceiling now. The upstairs wing was silent. “Keep her sedated,” the doctor had advised. Baby was sound asleep, despite the gramophone that Appu was playing in the drawing room.

  There was at last a break in the rains, the sun aslant through the sampigé trees, the flower beds gently steaming. The very kind of day that Nanju would have loved. Off he would have disappeared, poking about goodness knows where in the estate, checking on his beloved birdhouses.

  She looked at the telegram in her hand. It was addressed to Devanna. “Here,” she said, “for you.” Something from one of the stores from where he ordered his books, she presumed.

  “Ah?” Devanna patted his pockets, searching for his glasses.

  The cat on the verandah yawned and began licking its fur. “Around your neck,” Devi said without looking up, “they’re around your neck.” Devanna looked sheepishly at her and began to tear open the telegram.

  It was only when he dropped it, with a hoarse cry that so startled the cat outside that it jumped into the air, that Devi twisted toward him.

  “What? What is it?”

  Appu bent to pick up the telegram. He scanned its contents, his face turning ashen. “There … there has been an accident.”

  The telegram was from Bombay, from the university where Nanju taught. There had been a terrible accident, it informed them. “Monsoon; road having potholes. Mr. Nanjappa is no more.”

  The cat outside stalked stiff-legged and disgruntled to the window and leaped onto the sill. Slowly it began to lick its fur once more. A butterfly flew in just above its head, but the creature was too engrossed in its grooming to notice. The butterfly wandered into the room on bright yellow wings barely the span of a fingernail.

  Devanna was saying something, but there were not so much words as sounds. Syllables of grief, of the harshest bereavement. A litany of loss.

  Devi reached up and pulled her hair loose from its bun. It spilled about her shoulders, still thick, streaked here and there with silver. “My son,” she whispered. “My son.”

  The butterfly hovered above them all, bright as a laburnum petal, adrift in the breeze.

  Appu rushed to Bombay. A friend of his, engaged to a cousin of Jehangir Tata’s, pulled some strings on Appu’s behalf. He clambered aboard Tata’s single-engined mail carrier in Madras, folding himself among the mailbags, the only available space.

  “Posthaste, I suppose,” he said wanly to the pilot, casting desperately about for a joke.

  The pilot glanced soberly at him and nodded. “I heard of your circumstances. My condolences.”

  Appu fell silent. He sat hunched on the bags, his knees drawn almost to his chin as the Puss Moth pointed her nose into the sky. The roar of the engine all around him, loud, blessedly loud, driving all thought from his mind. He sat there, on his first flight, after all, but hardly noticing as the Puss Moth ducked and wove her way through the billowing, powder-puff clouds.

  Bombay was sweltering, so muggy that Nanju’s body had already been cremated. “Too much smelly, saar,” they explained helpfully to him at the morgue.

  There was nothing left of Nanju to bring back home at all.

  Chapter 40

  Tiger Hills was steeped in mourning. Devanna had lapsed into silence. Not a word did he utter, not a sound did he make, sitting as if turned to stone in the planter chair. The garden grew wild and untended. He did not seem to notice. He had worked like a man possessed for the first few weeks after the news had come, lashing together the tips of rosebushes, pulling this one from the soil, grafting those three together. And then he had collapsed, exhausted. Nobody understood the magic he had wrought, the lamentations he had poured into the soil, but when the roses bloomed, they were the darkest scarlet imaginable. So sootily red, they were very nearly black. He had filled the garden with them, in every available patch of soil. Red-black roses, like clumps of clotted blood, as if the entire garden had turned fissured and bleeding.

  The roses eventually withered and fell to the ground. The stems that should have been pruned lay neglected. They grew long and wild, crowned with thorns. Tukra faithfully watered the plants every morning and evening, but it was not enough. “What shall I weed today?” Tukra would ask. “Are there any cuttings to be done?” Devanna sat, unheeding.

  “Come, maava,” Baby urged. “Let us go pick some flowers. You and me together.”

  He looked, then, at the photograph of Nanju that was hung outside the prayer room. His smiling, open face framed so incongruously, so cruelly with the garland of fresh flowers that marked the dead. Devanna’s eyes filled with tears.

  If Devanna was silent the house, on the other hand, was filled with music. Sheets of it, swinging, thumping, twirling through the rooms. Appu seemed to play the gramophone without a break, as if this false gaiety would somehow compensate for the silence. “Baby, get dressed,” he would call. “We’re going to the Club.”

  At first Baby had thought her husband strangely stone-hearted. When the terrible news had arrived, Appu had not shed a tear. Devi had, for once, seemed at a complete loss; it was Appu who had called for the barber to shave his and Devanna’s heads; it was Appu who had sent the servants to the Nachimanda village and beyond, bearing tidings of the tragedy. It was he who had made the travel arrangements to visit Bombay. All the while dry-eyed, almost offhand.

  It was we
eks later when Baby had woken with a start. At first she had not been able to place the sound. A muffled choking. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again, that strange, smothered noise coming from the bathroom. She tapped on the bathroom door—“Appu?”—and when there was no reply, she had entered. He was leaning against the mirror, arms wrapped over his head. “Appu?” she had repeated, and he had turned toward her. It had taken the breath from her, the look on his face. Such a hunted, hopeless expression, the look of a man who had searched within himself and recognized that something was irreparably lacking.

  “Appu,” she said softly again, and he had shaken his head. “Here, darling, here,” she said, pressing forward and slipping her arms about him. That strangled sound again, and Appu began to cry. She covered his face with gentle kisses, on his lips, his neck, his forehead, that shaven head, then led him back to their bed. He had put his face in her lap, like a child, and wept so bitterly she thought her heart would break.

  “Nothing … ” She bent forward, the better to hear what he was saying. “I did nothing. I should have called him back, should have insisted … I did nothing, Baby, once again I did nothing.”

  Finally he had fallen asleep. The next morning it was as if nothing had happened. When she tried to talk with him about it, he whistled even louder, drowning out her words.

  He had not spoken of Nanju after that.

  The Indian hockey team left for the Los Angeles Olympics. Appu contrived to be at once absorbed in their progress. “I knew it!” He pumped his fist in the air, listening closely to the wireless broadcast of the finals. “Ah, Dhyan, Dhyan, what would we do without you!” He spoke the words almost reverentially. The four years since Amsterdam had scarcely blunted the prowess of the Indian team and his beloved Dhyan, it seemed.