Tiger Hills (9 page)

Muthavva flicked her daughter's cheek affectionately. “Why? Are you in such a hurry to leave your mother?”

“Don't make jokes, Avvaiah. How long before I have my own wedding?”

“Well, let's see now. First, you have to be a good child and listen to your mother. And then when you come of age and are a graceful, well-mannered young woman, we will find you a boy from a good family and have a grand wedding for you, how is that?”

Devi shook her head impatiently. “Avvaiah, I am not a little girl. And I will marry only Machu anna.”

“Who?” Muthavva asked, bewildered.

“The tiger killer … Machu anna, Devanna's cousin. I will marry him.”

Muthavva laughed. “Cheh. What foolishness is this? Little girls shouldn't talk this way; it doesn't become them. Besides, if you call him anna, that makes him your brother, not your husband.”

“Mark my words, Avvaiah. I will marry Machu.”

Muthavva gazed at her daughter's face in the lamplight and felt a strange chill down her spine. She became brisk. “Donkey girl. Enough of this nonsense. Go to sleep.”

She tightened the amulet on Devi's arm, trying to stay her sense of disquiet by checking and rechecking the knots. Finally satisfied that the amulet was securely fastened, Muthavva lowered the lamp and, kissing Devi's forehead, left the room.

Behind her, Devi stared through the window into the clear, starlit night. Beneath the blanket, her fists were curled into little balls, her nails pressing into the skin. She thought again of the tiger wedding, and of the bridegroom.

“Only him,” she repeated to herself. “I will marry only Machu.”

Chapter 6

1891

S
unlight streamed through the open doors, pooling over the maroon-lacquered floors of the mission. Sometime during the night, the skies had finally called a truce and the assault of the rains had abated. Mercara had awoken that morning to the forgotten sound of birdsong. Watery shafts of light spilled from behind dark gray clouds, laminating the town in opalescence. As the morning wore on, the sun had gained in confidence, scattering the clouds and blazing forth in all its splendor. Light danced from every surface, from within the raindrops suspended on a leaf, glancing off glass windows and diffusing from the hills in a shimmering haze.

Gundert stood on the verandah of his apartments, looking out at the dripping garden. He waved at passersby who called cheerfully to him, reveling in the everyday sounds so long suffocated by the rain. The potter calling out his wares, the
trrring
ing of bicycle bells, the whooping of children, the excited barking of dogs as they shook themselves in the sun. He looked up at the skies and smiled. “Devanna,” he called. “Come here a moment.

“Devanna,” he called again, a little louder this time. Frowning slightly, he went back indoors.

Devanna sat by the window of the dining room, engrossed in his painting. The colors had to be just right, the mauve tinged
with purple.
Cedrela toona.
How beautiful the names sounded in Latin, how much more majestic the trees seemed to become when they were called thus, standing straighter and taller, puffing out their chests with pride. Why, even the ordinary athi tree that Pallada Nayak cursed and spat at because of the way it extended its jumble of roots under the paddy fields, even that annoying tree carried poetry in its sap.
Fi-cus race-mosa
.

When the Reverend had introduced him to botany, he had opened up a whole new world. Devanna liked to recite the names of the books in his head:

Flora Sylvatica, Flora Indica, Spicilegium Neilgherrense, Icones Plantarum, Hortus Bengalensis, Hortus Calcuttensis, Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indicae

The Reverend had shown him colored plates and lithographs, the minute differences in serration that could mark a plant as an entirely new species. A keen amateur botanist when he had first arrived in Mercara, Gundert had let it be known that he was looking for exotic plants and that he would pay a fair sum for anything that caught his fancy. At first, people had knocked on the mission doors at all hours with plants they were sure would excite him: fiercely colored orchids, sweet-smelling sampigé, and slender shoots of wild jasmine. Gundert politely had these planted in the mission garden, explaining that such plants were already well documented in the scientific world; what he wanted was something new, some of the indigenous medicinal plants, perhaps?

They had brought him holy tulasi, so beloved by the ancestors and the Gods, and the delicately fronded narvisha that was planted in the courtyard of every home. The leaves of the narvisha had a pungent odor that was anathema to snakes, poisonous even to the mighty tiger, it was said. These, too, Gundert had regretfully declined as mundane. They had then brought him that most powerful of plants, madh toppu, or medicine green, which, when cooked along with jaggery and coconut milk at the onset of the monsoons, stained their piss bright red and was known to prevent
no fewer than forty-seven maladies. Gundert sighed.
Justicia wynaadensis
, he said, that was its name, and there were two specimens already growing in the Botanical Gardens in Bangalore. That was when most of the townspeople had thrown up their hands, shaking their heads over the obduracy of the Reverend. It was impossible to please him, they cried, it was hopeless. Gundert had finally resorted to field trips of his own, and in Devanna he found a gifted apprentice.

He taught Devanna the importance of discipline, the orderly mapping of an area, the close examination and recording of the tiniest detail. They combed through the hills in and around Mercara, sorting through armfuls of specimens and painstakingly documenting the most interesting. Devanna had a keen eye and a steady hand, but more important, he had a natural instinct for the work. Gundert had been surprised and then awed by his talent. Devanna dipped and swirled his brushes, his usual diffidence banished by his confident use of color.

As Gundert watched him replicate the specimens, applying a bold wash of green here, a dab of ochre, a hint of pink there, something had broken free deep within him. Spring, it seemed, had stolen softly into his ironbound heart.

Here at last, was the student he had searched for.

Here, his son.

He stood smiling in the doorway now, cupping his coffee and watching Devanna from the shadows.
Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him.

Devanna traced the outline of a bud with a firm hand, lost in his thoughts and still unaware of the Reverend's presence.
Ced-rela-toona.
Devi had little appetite for his fancy talk, as she called it. She shrugged her shoulders impatiently when he showed her the spores clinging pregnant with life to the underside of a fern, or told her that the fig was not really a fruit but a flower. “What does it matter!” she had exclaimed. What was in a name—figs tasted the same, didn't they, whether you called them a fruit or a flower? Far more interesting, she had proclaimed, to know the histories of the trees instead, in the
time before they were rooted to the ground, when they walked and talked with the Gods.

The butter tree so beloved to Krishna Swami, who used its spoon-shaped leaves to steal butter from his mother's churn.

The handsome ashoka, the tree of no-sadness that banished all your woes if you sat beneath its branches and flowered only when a beautiful woman placed her henna-tipped feet upon its trunk.

The gun flower groves that grew in the jungles of Coorg but withered away in captivity. They bloomed each year during Kailpodh, the festival of arms. Just that one week in the entire year, an orange-yellow blossom to decorate the mouth of every gun in Coorg, and then they faded away as silently as they had appeared.

When Devanna had told her about the herbarium at Kew, home to the largest collection of specimens anywhere in the world, she had flicked her braid over her shoulder and told him not to bore her. “Go away, Devanna,” she had yawned. “Leave me alone and stop chewing my brains.”

A shadow passed over Devanna's face as he worked. She had been increasingly strange with him, snapping for no reason and bursting into tears at the slightest pretext. “Stop following me around,” she had told him angrily. “Why can't you go hunting or climb trees or whatever it is that boys are supposed to do instead?”

She preferred to spend her time with the girls of the village instead, the very same girls she had found too sissy just a couple of years ago. Now, all she seemed to want to do was sit about whispering and giggling.

“You are growing up, monae, you are both growing up,” Muthavva and Tayi had explained, trying not to smile when he wandered disconsolately into the kitchen. “And Devi is older than you, nearly fourteen she is. Girls, they mature faster than boys. She has different interests now, that's all.”

He had pretended not to care, and when the schools had closed for the monsoons and Gundert had suggested to Pallada Nayak that Devanna stay on at the mission for extra tutoring, Devanna
had, much to everyone's surprise, agreed.
Devi would realize how much she missed him when he was gone.

He glanced briefly outside the window. Twenty days he had been gone from the village, twenty days of never-ending, torrential rain. He had counted each day and waited patiently for a break in the clouds. And then this morning, Devanna had awoken in the mission dormitory, sleepily trying to put a finger on what was so different today. The silence, he realized abruptly, fully awake now and listening intently. The rattling of the rain on the roof was finally ended. Flinging off the blankets, not even noticing the cold draft nipping at his ankles, he had raced to open the window. Today, he could go home at last.

Cedrela toona
, he said to himself again now, returning to his painting. Two more washes of color, he decided, and then he would ask the Reverend if he could leave.

He started in surprise as the Reverend placed an affectionate hand upon his shoulder. “Did you not hear me calling you? It is good, very good,” said Gundert, peering at his work. “Although, a little more definition here, perhaps?” He pointed at the tip of a leaf. “No matter,” he continued, “enough documenting for today. Put away your brushes and come outside. There is such a rainbow, likely the largest the town has ever seen. We can pay a visit to the store as well, see what new surprises Hans has for us.”

The mission trading shop! Devanna hurriedly cleared away the pots of paint and put on his shoes. He headed outside, blinking owlishly in the sunshine. The Reverend was right. A huge rainbow hung in the pellucid air, arcing over the town, truly the largest that Devanna had ever seen. He turned impulsively toward the Reverend, pointing at the rainbow. “Tayi says it is Indra Swami taking out his bow.”

Gundert burst out laughing. “Come, Dev!” he exclaimed. “Surely you do not believe that? It is only an optical illusion, yes? The sun reflecting the moisture in the air. Beautiful beyond any mortal creation, and
there
lies the divinity, the miracle of its creation. No bow, though, and certainly no militant rain god.”

Devanna flushed with embarrassment. Why had he opened his
mouth? He often felt there were two parts to himself—Mission-Devanna and Coorg-Devanna. The mission-school half could paint, recite Wordsworth, and make a perfect sign of the cross, and he knew all about reflection and refraction. He wore shoes at all times, even inside the mission, the bows of his laces perfectly equal lengths.

Coorg-Devanna, on the other hand, knew of the other, not-so-obvious things. He knew of the veera, the spirits of ancient valiants who, shocked, by their own violent deaths, now shadowed the living. He knew the sweetness of the nectar that pooled inside the lantana blossoms, had felt the heat of germinating paddy slush against his bare feet, the mud oozing from between his toes. He knew
full
well that when displeased, Indra Swami threw thunderbolts from his palace in the heavens.

Devanna usually managed to keep these halves separate, each unquestioningly in its place, but every once in a while one would throw a leg over the stile to encroach into the other's territory. Like now. He nodded sheepishly at the Reverend, feeling foolish.

He soon cheered up at the trading store. “Reverend!” roared Hans, the beefy proprietor, as they entered, startling the two Englishwomen inside. “
Wie gehts?
” He bounded up to them, and for a minute it seemed as if he might actually envelop the Reverend in a bear hug.

Gundert took an involuntary step back and glanced at the women. “Ah, Hans,” he replied in his clipped accent. “I am well, thank you for asking, and you?” He raised his hat at the ladies and they smiled.

“Reverend. We haven't seen you at the club in a while. Has the mission been keeping you busy?”

“Too busy!” intervened Hans. “Our Reverend, the only things he is to be good for is the books. No ladies or the wine for him. Doesn't needs them, not like the rest of us who needs them always in this always-raining land.” He burst into laughter, oblivious to the scandalized expressions of the women.