Tiger Hills (11 page)

And then Muthavva died.

Devanna sat miserably through the death rites, unable even to look at Devi. Why hadn't he made them listen to him? If only the
Reverend had been called sooner. If only he had known what to do. “Never again,” he vowed to himself. “Never again will I be so helpless.”

When he finally went to the Pallada house after the funeral, Devanna gave the Nayak the letter from Gundert. In it, the Reverend had written of his plans to expand the attendance in the school by starting a hostel. It might make sense for Devanna to enroll as a boarder in the coming year, he wrote; he was an exemplary student, and living at the mission would eliminate all the time spent walking back and forth from the village.

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

Q
uinine,” 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 hills, 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.