Tiger Hills (47 page)

Appu set down the ball and glanced briefly about him as he straightened up, taking the measure of the field. He swung the stick experimentally from side to side, absorbed in the weight of it in his hands. Fixing his gaze firmly on the ball, Appu began to dribble. Slowly at first, as he got acquainted with the new stick. Gradually he picked up speed, dribbling faster and faster, breaking into a wide, unconscious grin as the stick responded to his touch. Up and down the length of the field Appu ran, weaving this way and that, effortlessly driving the ball before him.

When the warden spotted him from the hostel windows and bellowed out, “Come in at
once,
youngster,” Appu did not even look up, focused solely on his game. The irate warden came rushing down the stairs and out to the field.

Half the new class hung out of the hostel windows to watch. “Crazy bugger!” they commiserated, watching the warden descend upon Appu. “He's in for it now!”

Appu barely turned a hair, however, as he turned to smile pleasantly at the warden. “No, sir, I did not hear the bell,” he said, quite reasonably.

“No, sir, I did not know the field is closed at six p.m.”

“Yes, sir, of course, at once.” Scooping up the ball with a flick of his stick, he put it in his pocket and loped back to the hostel, whistling.

The warden stared irritably at his retreating figure, aware that the wind had been neatly taken out of his sails, but uncertain quite how that had happened. “You,” he shouted, turning his annoyance toward the sweeper. “Oaf. What were you doing encouraging the boy? Don't you know sports are not allowed this late?”

“Saar, yes saar,” the sweeper mumbled, picking up his broom and whisking it smartly, double-quick across the field.

Captain Balmer posted Appu a fat package of Cadbury's chocolate, and with the parcel a letter, congratulating him on his admission to Bidders. “Your father was a fine man,” he wrote. “Should you grow up to fill only half his shoes, I would still know you to be head and shoulders above most men. I shall be following your progress at Bidders with interest; should there be anything you require, do not hesitate to ask.”

The year passed in the most amiable fashion. It was a casual, natural leadership Appu exuded, and there was no sport, it seemed, that he did not excel in. He became the center forward of the junior hockey league. He was a star cross-country runner and a critical part of the swim and tennis teams. All of which served, in a sports-mad school such as Bidders, to propel him to the forefront of popularity.

It did not hurt, either, that he had access to eye-poppingly large sums of pocket money. All he had to do was telegraph Avvaiah—for tennis lessons, he explained at first, or a school
trip, but soon, even those explanations stopped. They were not needed—twenty rupees, his telegraphs would say, or fifteen, or thirty, and within the week, the money appeared magically in his account. It never occurred to Devi to ask for an explanation. What could the child spend the money on, after all? A few more cakes at the tuckshop, perhaps, but where was the harm in that?

And indeed, Appu was generous, treating anyone who asked to chocolates and milk sweets, but he soon discovered the far more exciting privileges that money could buy. The school had in its employment a roster of youngsters from the local villages to tend to the school grounds, to clean the masters' quarters and man the gates. It was an open secret in the hostel that for the right price, any of these enterprising fellows, the watchmen especially, could be persuaded to smuggle in ciggies, comics, and even booze. Appu promptly pressed them into service. It was an unthinking authority that he imposed on them, the same that Devi might employ with her own workers, a superiority so rooted in obvious privilege that the watchmen automatically obeyed.

Many of the coffee pickers at Nari Malai came from regions outside Coorg, and along with the Kanarese that he spoke fluently, Appu had also absorbed a smattering of Malayalam and Tamil. The watchmen were thrilled that the young sir could converse with them in their own tongue. Come to our hut, anna, they said, and Appu visited often after school hours, squatting on his haunches and smoking their beedis.

After each term ended, Appu headed immediately back to Nari Malai, his trunks loaded with sports trophies that Devi polished to a shine with tamarind paste and placed in a custom-built rosewood cabinet in the foyer. She fretted incessantly over him. “How thin you have become, legs like a chicken's! Such fat fees I pay and still they can't feed you properly?”

“I've grown taller, Avvaiah, that's all,” Appu would point out, amused, but this Devi would ignore as she hurried to the kitchen. Nanju would glance at Appu then, half jealous of all the fuss. It was hard for him to remain irritated, though, not with Appu winking comically at him behind their mother's back—“
Like a
chicken?
Not even a rooster, but a
chicken?
More like it is Avvaiah who is the funny old hen, huh, Nanju? Pwuuck, pwuuuck, pwuuck …”—and generally doing such a perfect imitation of Devi's lamentations that Nanju would burst out laughing.

The idyll of holidays ended, Appu would return to Bidders, pockets heavy with cash and his trunks loaded with food. Devanna wrote to him regularly, and every once in a while there was a laboriously written affair from Nanju. He wrote about the college he would be attending next summer. The forms had been filled in; it was a fine institution, people said, one of the few in the country to have been chartered by the state.

Devanna sent Appu the details of Nanju's leaving. Nanju would be graduating in agricultural studies at the University of Mysore, he wrote. The King of Mysore had sent his experts on a five-year field trip around the world, he wrote, and the university had been established based on the promotion of original research (University of Chicago), the extension of knowledge (University of Wisconsin), and the promulgation of an educational system that would train its students for political and social life (universities of Oxford and Cambridge).

Devanna's letters always ended the same: “Your mother sends her love and her blessings. She asks that you make sure to eat properly and not be shy in asking the masters for more tiffin should you be hungry. Please, son, keep us informed of your progress. Let me know at once should anyone treat you roughly.”

It was while he was in his second year at Bidders, or Biddies as the boys called it, that Appu learned of the KCIO program. When he returned to Coorg in the summer of 1918, he had an important announcement to make. “Avvaiah,” he said excitedly, “I am going to apply for the Kings Commission.”

Devi looked bewildered. “The what?”

“The KCIO program … Kings Commissioned Indian Officers.” Devanna elaborated. “The war—with so many Indian soldiers sacrificed to its cause, Indian politicians have been pushing for Indians
to be allowed into the army as officers of rank, not just as troops. It's been all over the newspapers. The program is very selective, only a few seats to be released each year, and there is a strict interview process. The chosen few will receive the Kings Commission, and be allowed to command even British troops.”

“Yes!” Appu nodded vigorously, his hair falling into his eyes. “The KCIO, Avvaiah! I could be a general in the army one day!”

Devi smiled. “The army, is it? Like your father? We'll see, we'll see … ”

“A
general,
can you imagine? Ayy, Tukra,” he called to the Poleya, who was pottering around the dining room, wiping the afternoon dust from the window sills, “did you hear? You better learn to salute me.”

“Saloot?” Tukra asked, interested. “But how do you do this saloot?”

Appu leaped from his chair and, spinning Tukra around, raised the latter's hand to his forehead. “There. Like so,
this
is a salute. Now stand still so we can admire you.”

So ridiculous did Tukra look, standing stiffly to attention, fingers splayed in an awkward salute, the ubiquitous dust cloth hanging from his shoulder like some faulty epaulette, that they all began to laugh.

“Oh, don't listen to him, Tukra,” Devi said, amused. “Mr. General Sir,” she said to Appu, “sit down and finish your lunch.”

So insistent was the political pressure on the government that the KCIO policy was promptly implemented, and in October 1918 the first batch of Indian cadets was initiated into the program. Devanna sent Appu a clipping from the newspapers. Only fifty seats had been released. There had been seventy applicants from all over the country, scions of the finest families in the land, even royals from the houses of Kapurthala, Baroda, and Jamnagar. Despite the fifty vacancies, just forty-two candidates were deemed promising enough to be admitted into the program, and among them, there was a Coorg. “Nineteen-year-old Cariappa,” Devanna wrote, “will be among the first KCIOs in the country. Should he set a strong example, it will only bolster your own application.”

Balmer was highly supportive of Appu's ambition. “Nothing would make me happier, and, I suspect, your father, if he were alive, more proud. If you should need recommendations,” he wrote, “I would be honored to provide you with mine.”

A month later, the war ended, a ceasefire coming into effect at 11 a.m. on the eleventh of November, 1918—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and almost midway through Appu's third year at Bidders. The principal gave the boys a half day to celebrate the Allied victory. Restless and irritated because it meant that there would be no hockey practice that evening, Appu wandered over to the watchmen's hut. He took a deep puff of a beedi, the acrid smoke searing his lungs. Suddenly a thought struck him.

“You all, what is it that you do for fun?” he asked the watchmen, squinting at them through the smoke. “No, not gilli danda. What do you take me for, an idiot? Not childhood games, what do you do for
real
fun?”

The watchmen looked at one another, hemmed and hawed for a bit, and then told him about the cockfights held in their village.

They were not
actually
held, mind you, how could they be, when they had been banned by the local magistrate? They were a respectable, law-abiding lot. Ask any of the villagers and they would vehemently deny ever having laid eyes on a fighting rooster, let alone having had anything to do with attending or organizing a fight. Still, when the moon was high, and the locally brewed arrack flowed freely … now and again, something might be arranged.

The local policemen were invited to share in the booze and partake of the winnings from the fight, and by the next morning: Cockfight? What cockfight?

When it became known in the hostel that Appu had somehow arranged an illicit cockfight, his already prominent star rose among the seniors. He greased the palms of the watchmen generously, and their collective conscience prickled only briefly. It was
a sizable contingent of boys that slipped out of the school gates the evening of the fight. “Quickly, come,” the guide sent from the village urged them nervously, leading them to a natural dip in the land that lay to the side of the settlement. A makeshift ring had been demarcated by sticks, illuminated by a single, reedy lantern. Two stringy-looking roosters were pushed squawking into the ring, and with a low whistle from someone, the fight officially began.

At first the birds tried to escape, desperately flapping their clipped wings, but they were pushed unceremoniously back inside the ring. Resigning themselves at last to the fact that there was no way out, they flew viciously at one another, clawing, pecking, and ripping with their specially sharpened beaks. The boys stared transfixed, some ashen, some with faces flushed, each unable to tear his eyes away from the torn feathers, the trails of dark blood that ran thicker and thicker down the cartilaginous legs of the birds. They shouted too, along with the villagers, hoarse cries of excitement and encouragement, urging, cursing, willing the exhausted, faltering roosters forward, until at last one of them keeled over into the dust.

A cheer went up through the crowd and money swiftly changed hands as, with a final, swift wringing of their necks, the bodies of both roosters, the vanquished as well as the victor, were tossed aside.

Later that night, when one of the seniors reached into his pocket, it took Appu some seconds to grasp fully what it was that had been placed in his hands.

He had heard about it, of course; every boy in Bidders had. One of the seniors had filched the miniature from his father's library. It featured a woman, Appu knew, in a wondrous state of undress. One of his classmates claimed he had even got a peek at the painting before the senior, whose room he had been cleaning, had spotted him and soundly boxed his ears. Unfortunately, the painting had been lying facedown and he had not seen very much.

It was an old Mughal miniature, the ivory on which it was
painted dulled and yellowed with the years, the lapis lazuli along its rim missing here and there.

The artist's muse was a young woman, luxuriating in her bath, her head arched to expose the single strand of pearls looped about her throat. Her eyes were shut, her lips, a rosebud red, partly open. A gauzy veil lay across her body, revealing more than it hid. Apart from that, she was unabashedly naked.

Appu's heart began to race as he devoured her with his eyes, the tips of her breasts, the alabaster whiteness of her belly. The whorls of hair peeping from between her legs.

“Down, boy,” the senior snickered. “Never seen one of
these
before, have you?”

Appu was struck dumb. He barely slept that night, consumed by what he had seen and sweating uncomfortably in his bed. The next evening, he went to the watchmen's hut with a proposition. They must have family working in the tea plantations in the area. Erotica, he told them. Smut. It would likely be in the master study, or in the bedroom. “Check the drawers,” he told them. “Filch some for me and I'll pay you well.”