Tiger Hills (3 page)

The old man sighed. Who could say what they meant, the birds? It was said that when a king cobra happened upon a sleeping man and, instead of sinking its fangs into his flesh, fanned its hood instead, to shelter him from the sun, then that man would someday be king. The herons … maybe they foretold something, maybe they did not. Who could read the mind of God?

When Thimmaya went to see Pallada Nayak the next day on his way back to the outpost, the Nayak generously excused him from the remainder of his lookout duty. It was only fair to Muthavva, he said, and besides, it was sowing season, and Thimmaya had another mouth to feed. The Nayak would send his youngest son in Thimmaya's place.

The paddy that year was so bountiful that Thimmaya was able to buy two milch cows with the gold it fetched him; the cardamom prices were the highest they had been in six years. The family sacrificed a rooster to the ancestors for blessing them with a daughter who brought with her such good fortune. They named her Devamma, after Thimmaya's great-grandmother, but called her Devi, their very own Goddess.

Muthavva never entirely forgot the herons. She kept the amulet firmly tied around her daughter's arm, surreptitiously scanning the skies each time she took the baby outdoors. As the months passed, however, and nothing untoward happened, she relaxed her vigil. The birds had been a figment of her imagination, she told herself, the phantasms of a pregnant woman. She was entirely too preoccupied to notice them the night of Gauramma's wedding.

The village had been abuzz for weeks. It was an excellent match; Pallada Nayak's daughter was marrying the third son of Kambeymada Nayak, from the village that lay two hundred furlongs to the south. The latter was one of the wealthiest men in Coorg, with fifteen hundred acres of wetlands, several hundred more of cardamom country, and multiple coffee estates. Even his tobacco spittoon, it was rumored, was made of solid gold. Nobody had actually seen the spittoon but then which Coorg in his right mind would openly display such treasures for the Poleya servants to covet? Besides, hadn't the old man commissioned a fabulous walking stick just this past month in Mercara, carved from the finest rosewood and inlaid with ivory? Ah, the village concurred, it was a lucky girl who entered the Kambeymada family, and who better than their own gentle Gauru?

Pallada Nayak spared no expense for the wedding. The moon rose high over the village green as liquor flowed freely and cauldrons of wild boar, chicken, mutton, vegetable, and egg curries were hauled from the open-air kitchens. The two shifts of musicians played without a break, Thimmaya and the other men dipping and swaying to the wail of their trumpets. The groom had arrived, and he and his family were being feted and fed. Women bustled about in shimmering silks, their faces rendered even more alluring by moonlight. Jewels glowed against their satiny skins. Wide adigé collars of uncut rubies banded their necks, and ropes of golden-beaded jomalé, and coral pathaks with hooded cobra pendants, their ruby eyes flashing fire. Half-moon kokkéthathis of seed pearls and gold swung at their breasts. Bangles—elephant
headed, gemstone studded, plain, and filigreed—were slung about their wrists, diamonds sparkling in seven starred clusters from their ears.

Muthavva sat with the other nursing and pregnant women, exempt from hostessing chores. Children were running about, her own boy no doubt getting up to mischief somewhere in the melee. Thimmaya's mother would keep an eye on him and see that he was fed. She was content to sit here and listen to the chatter, the relaxed weight of her sleeping daughter in her arms.

What
a pretty bride Gauru made, the women sighed, a trifle large, it was true, but who could deny the sweetness of her face? He was a lucky man, her husband, and … “Uyyi!” they exclaimed, as a pack of laughing boys came hurtling through the crowd and collided with Muthavva.

“Is this any way to behave?” the women scolded, as the boys sheepishly untangled themselves. “Do you have pebbles for eyes, can you not see where you are going? See now, you have woken the baby and made her cry.”

“Sorry, we are sorry,” they apologized, backing away.

One of them, though, barely ten or eleven years old, stood his ground, gazing at the bawling Devi. “By all the Gods, she is loud!” he observed, his golden-brown eyes dancing with amusement. “It is a wonder my ears can still hear.” Before Muthavva could object, he reached with a grubby finger to touch Devi's cheek and, flashing an engaging, dimpled grin, disappeared into the crowd.

Shushing Devi back to sleep, irritated that she hadn't scolded the boy more thoroughly, Muthavva never saw the flock of herons that rose silently from the trees, silhouetted against the moon as they passed over the green.

Chapter 2

A
s the first girl to be born into the Nachimanda family in over sixty years, Devi was the object of adoration of the entire household. Her brother, Chengappa, and her cousins waited on her every whim, hoisting her onto their shoulders as they paraded about the village green, climbing the wild mango trees in the courtyard to pick her the ripest, most sun-kissed fruit, and stuffing their pockets with little gifts for her—the velvety plumes of jungle fowl, wild honeycomb wrapped dripping in pipal leaves, and the purple stones to be found occasionally half-buried in the forest floor.

Devi had only to frown and her grandmother, Tayi, would come running, bribing her with salted gooseberries and cubes of jaggery until she deigned to smile again. Tayi rolled out dozens upon dozens of flaky, multilayered chiroti, frying them golden and dredging them in powdered sugar as treats for her darling. When the family realized that Devi was fond of fish, come rain or shine, Tayi would be at the weekly shanty so early that the vendors would still be setting out their wares. She would exchange weighty baskets of plantains from the grove behind the house for still-slithering sardines, stuffing them with coriander and tamarind and crisping them in sizzling pork lard for her angel.

Tayi would seat herself on a reed mat, her legs extended out
in front of her. Placing Devi upon her soft, comfortable shins, she would massage Devi's hair with shoe flowers steeped in coconut oil. Her gnarled fingers worked rhythmically upon Devi's scalp as she recounted endless stories about Devi's grandfather, the war against Mysore, and the veera in the lane who made the dogs bark and the trees shiver with no seeming explanation. “You are my precious flower bud,” she would tell Devi, “my sun, and my moon, along with all the stars in the sky.”

No one, however, was more smitten than Thimmaya. He doted on his daughter, insisting that hers must be the last face he saw before heading out for the fields, otherwise nothing would go quite right. When the Kandahari gypsies came down from the North-West Frontier mountains to Coorg to sell their horses and shawls, they heard about the new girl child and came sashaying up to the Nachimanda house. It was customary for every Coorg girl or woman to sport a tiny tattoo on her forehead, a pretty, blue-green dot. The gypsies offered to tattoo Devi's forehead. “Ah, I have been looking out for you,” Muthavva began, but Thimmaya winced. Unable to bear even the thought of the brief discomfort his daughter would have to endure, and ignoring the agitated counsel of the women of the house, Thimmaya bucked tradition and sent the gypsies on their way.

“Why are you after my princess?” he would chide Muthavva as she berated a mud-streaked Devi for being as dirty as a Poleya. “Let her be. She will leave us soon enough for her husband's home,” he would admonish as she shouted at Devi to be still while she braided her hair.

“You are spoiling this girl,” Muthavva would warn, but even she would smile as Devi tucked her head in her mother's lap, grinning up at her. “Donkey child,” she would scold, bending down to kiss the top of her daughter's head, fragrant with sunshine and the wind in the paddy.

When Devi was five, a scandal gripped the village, setting tongues wagging for weeks. Pallada Nayak's daughter, Gauramma, who
had been married off with so much pomp just a few years before, returned to her grandfather's home. She arrived one afternoon with neither warning nor escort, her young son on her hip. She offered no explanation, saying only that if there was no place for her here, then she would go elsewhere, she did not know where, but
never
would she return to her husband's home.

Her mother wept; her aunts cajoled and castigated. Pallada Nayak hurried with two of his sons to the Kambeymada home, bearing with them five sacks of fragrant red kesari rice, a cartload of plantains, two haunches of salted venison, and a gold-threaded cummerbund that one of Gauru's aunts had been saving for her own son's wedding. Kambeymada Nayak was polite but firm. The girl had left of her own accord, he pointed out, stroking his mustache. She would have to return on her own as well.

“What do we do?” her aunts lamented to Tayi, Muthavva, and the other village women who had come to commiserate. “She simply refuses to listen. And look at the child, it's affecting him as well. Four years old but he hardly says a word, just clings to his mother's pleats all day with his thumb in his mouth.”

Gauru gave no sign that she had heard, tranquilly rocking her son back and forth in her lap as she sat on the kitchen stoop. Devi, bored and fidgeting, pulled a face at the little boy. He turned away, burying his face in his mother's neck. Devi composed her features before Muthavva saw her and boxed her ears, but she continued to watch the boy out of the corner of her eye. When he peeped at her again, she pulled the most horrid face she knew, the one Chengappa had made her practice: nostrils flared, tongue protruding, and eyelids turned inside out. The boy looked at her gravely and then turned away again. Fascinated by his steadfast refusal to engage with her, Devi sidled over to Gauru.

“Is he your baby?” she asked finally.

Gauru nodded.

“What's your name?” Devi asked, but the boy pretended he hadn't heard and sucked his thumb noisily.

“Devanna,” his mother answered for him, pulling his thumb gently from his mouth.

“Why doesn't he talk?”

“He will, when he has something to say.”

“They are saying you shouldn't have come back.”

“This is my home,” Gauru said simply.

This, Devi understood. She too loved her home: Tayi, who made her hot ottis with the faint imprints of her fingertips still embedded in their edges, the roan cow, the bitch mongrel with her warm-bellied puppies, her brother and cousins and Appaiah and Avvaiah and Tukra the Poleya servant boy and the frogs that sang in the fields and the mango tree in the courtyard and …

“I will never leave my home,” she said stoutly. Gauru smiled and ruffled Devi's hair.

The weeks passed and the family slowly gave up hope that Gauru would return. Pallada Nayak decreed that she and her son should be given a room in the Pallada house for as long as she wanted, but otherwise he completely ignored his daughter. Her uncles spat disgustedly into the mud as she passed, and her cousins slapped their foreheads. They were doomed, they moaned, for who would want a bride from a family in which the women left their husbands so shamelessly?

Tayi visited the Pallada house as often as she could; the Palladas were related to her after all, through a cousin twice removed, and she felt the pain of her kin deeply. “Which parents would be happy,” she brooded aloud, “to see a grown daughter ruin the family name in this fashion, abandoning her husband's hearth and refusing to return?”

“But, Tayi,” piped up Devi, “Gauru akka missed her own home.”

“Be quiet, donkey girl,” Muthavva said automatically. Devi rolled her eyes elaborately behind Muthavva's back. What was all the fuss about? She liked visiting Gauru akka; she gave her all those saris to play with. And Devanna was her friend, was he not? For, not one to be put off by an initial rebuff, Devi had set out to bedazzle him with a vengeance. The child had stood little chance; it was not long before he, like everyone else, had succumbed to her charms.

Tayi tried talking to Gauru. “The boy seems to be doing well,” she said one day, as they watched Devi and Devanna playing. Gauru smiled.

“Have you considered reconciling with the boy's father?” Tayi probed. “He is your
husband,
Gauru. And Devanna, his only son … ”

“Leave it be, Tayi, there's no point.”

“But, kunyi,” pressed Tayi, “as a wife, you have a duty to your husband. And think of your child. You must never come between father and son. Whatever disagreements exist between the husband and wife, why should the child suffer?”

Gauru did not reply, her eyes filling with tears. Softhearted Tayi searched hastily for a change of subject.

“Uyyi!” she exclaimed. “Will you look at this granddaughter of mine, she has got into your saris.”

Gauru looked over to where a silk-swathed Devi was parading in front of Devanna. She smiled tremulously. “She likes to wear my saris and jewels—the only things she doesn't like are my bangles.” On cue, Devi picked up a golden kokkéthathi and put it about her, the necklace reaching to her waist. Devanna clapped delightedly. They watched as Devi draped a veil over her head, tripping over its sequined ends. “I like having her visit. It does Devanna good.”