Tiger Hills (57 page)

“You may stay,” she said, “in this incomparable land, but first, you must promise me something. Every year,
when I emerge anew into this world from the Bhagamandala mountain, you must be there to greet me. Float flowers and coconuts into my waters, and in return I will give this land to you for all time. I shall flow through your holdings in rivers of sweet-fleshed fish and fat black river crabs. I shall water your fields, filling them with brooks and puddles that shall host the graceful, white-winged birds of your birth land. I shall tumble through these hills in a thousand waterfalls and see to it always that the forest teems with life.”

Our people promised the beautiful maiden that they would do as she said. She smiled, and it was like the sun shining through a stream. “Yours shall be a blessed race,” she said, “a pearl-like race of valiant men and women of honor. May your fields be always ripe with grain, may your flowers always bloom.”

She looked at them. “Why do you still look so sad?”

They told her then, of the dead, of all those left behind. Her eyes grew tender, and they were the color of a shaded jungle pool. She pointed a finger to the skies, and lightning flashed through the clouds. “Your veera shall live on. In the skies, in evening mists, in the shadows behind the trees. Your ancestors,” she said in blessing, “shall watch over you forever.”

There was a great sigh at her words, like the gusting of a breeze. The clouds above their heads parted, and shadows flitted through the trees. The leaves on the trees rustled, despite there being no wind, and then once more, there was silence. When they turned back to the maiden, she had vanished.

They settled here, our forefathers, in this land of sparkling water and open skies. And now and again, it is said, when the clouds part and the rain falls like silver, now and again, the veera step forth from the shadows to take root among us once more.

The drums continued to beat outside. Devi stood silent as a statue, the white of her sari and her skin seeming almost to shimmer in the dim light, her hair curling about her shoulders.

Word had come to Tiger Hills the previous evening. Tayi was poorly, and the doctor had said it would not be long. Devi had flown, shocked, to the Nachimanda house. A fever, Chengappa told her, his eyes weary. A stubborn fever had taken root inside Tayi and left her weakened. He had thought it best to summon all the family. “Where have you been, Devi?” he chided. “She's been asking for you.”

Tayi lay in her cot, her shrunken frame almost swallowed by the blankets. “Tayi?” she whispered. “Don't worry about a thing, all will be fine.”

She took Tayi's hand in her own. How frail Tayi seemed, barely a handful of skin and bones.

Tayi stirred. “Devi kunyi?”

“Shhh.” Devi stroked Tayi's hair. “Try not to speak, the doctor has said you must rest.”

“Rest is all there is left for me now, kunyi … Water … ”

Devi poured a tumbler of water from the clay pot. “Don't talk like that, you have a fever, that's all.”

Tayi shook her head. “This is the end for me. I feel it in my heart.” She lay back against the pillows, breathing heavily. “Where … So many days you did not come?”

Devi bit her lip. “I know, it was just that … ”

“Appu. He has returned safely?”

Devi nodded unsteadily. “He has.”

He had wired a telegram from the ship—“Arr. 20th Madras, Coorg immed. after.” Predictably, it had already been the nineteenth by the time the telegram had reached Tiger Hills. There had barely been time to marinate the chicken for the pulao and buy fresh fish from the shanty, to send the servants foraging for the umbrella mushrooms Appu so loved, when there he was, framed in the doorway.

“Avvaiah.”

Devi had promised herself she would be aloof and distant when
he arrived. Teach him a lesson, she would, for all those months of silence. One look at his face, though, tired and travel-worn, and her heart had melted. She had flung aside the ladle, still steaming from the pulao. As he had bent to touch her feet Devi had pulled him to her, cupping his face in her palms. “I was afraid that you would never … It's good, kunyi,” she said, “it's good to have you home.”

He had stood before her, remaining strangely withdrawn when touching Devanna's feet as well. It was only when Nanju had walked in from the estate that any real emotion had crossed Appu's face. His eyes had unexpectedly welled with tears, and he had flung his arms about his older brother in a tight bear hug. “Nanju.”

Nanju awkwardly patted Appu on the back. “So you came home. You came back after all.”

He had slept. How he had slept, for almost an entire day. And then he had awoken in the middle of the night, as hungry as a horse. She had stayed up with him, sitting across from him at the table as he ate. Just watching him eat, filling his plate again and again until at last he was sated. He had wanted to set out immediately to visit Baby, and Devi had laughed. “So impatient. No, kunyi, not when there are hardly any weeks left until the wedding. It's not auspicious for the groom to see the bride before the wedding day.”

She had thought he might argue, but he had nodded. “Let's have the wedding as soon as we can, then” was all he said in reply.

Devi rubbed Tayi's hand between her own, trying to get some warmth into the stiff fingers. “I meant to visit sooner … Anyway, I am here now, and I am not leaving until you get up from this cot.”

She brushed off Chengappa's suggestions that she get some rest, it could be a long day tomorrow. “No.” She sat by her grandmother's side, moistening her forehead with cloths soaked in rosewater, as the hours wore on and Tayi continued to wheeze in her bed. Now and again, there was a snuffle from the dogs outside, the only other sound.

Devi silently bargained with the Gods.
Fifteen gold sovereigns,
she offered Iguthappa Swami,
fifteen sovereigns to your temple, or fifty, I don't care, just let my Tayi be well. Two pigs,
she promised the veera,
the fattest, largest sows in all of Coorg I will have shot in your name, and any number of fowl.

“All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.”

“What?” Devi sat up, startled, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Tayi, did you say something?”

“
Let all her sins come on my head, Iguthappa Swami,
I used to pray,
give her nothing but happiness.
” Tayi started to cough, her lips so pale they seemed almost blue.

“Get some rest, Tayi, please,” Devi said tremulously.

“How is she doing?” Chengappa's wife had softly entered the room. “Here, do you want me to take over for a while?”

“No, it's all right,” Devi said. She forced a smile and looked up at her sister-in-law. “Get some rest.”

Chengappa's wife squeezed Devi's arm briefly and left, shutting the door behind her.

Devi turned back toward the bed. Tayi's cataracted eyes were filled with tears. “If I could do anything, anything to change the past … When I think of that morning, your face … I thought, if we all forgot, if we
never
spoke of it again, it would give you a way to go on. That what happened would be buried. Perhaps it was foolish, but it seemed the right thing to do.”

“Tayi, hush,” Devi said huskily. She pressed her grandmother's hand to her lips.

“I know you are still very angry inside. Angry with what happened, angry with me for not allowing you to send word to Machu.” She went into another paroxysm of coughing. “Each … each of us has sorrow allotted to us, and happiness, too. Iguthappa Swami doles out both. The past is gone, kunyi. Look to the future. Be happy, make others happy. Devanna, he has suffered, too.”

Despite herself, Devi began to bristle. “Tayi, enough, I don't want to—”

Tayi placed her palm on Devi's cheek, her fingers trembling uncontrollably.
“Forgive him, kunyi. So many years … forgive him.”

“Forgive him?
Forgive
him? Do you know what it is like, Tayi, to mourn someone each and every day, and not even be permitted to acknowledge the loss? In the world's eyes, I have no claim to Machu, he was nothing to me. Only I know … ” She brushed her hands across her eyes. “
So many years,
yes, but it does not become easier with time. It just grows heavier and heavier, this loss of which I may not even speak. Like a stone about my neck, with nowhere to put it down. And you tell me to
forgive
Devanna?”

“He has suffered, too.” Tayi closed her eyes. “The sorrow you bear, he carries a weight within him, too.”

Her voice grew faint. “My flower bud … I have told you so often, the true beauty of a flower lies not in the size or color of its petals, but in its fragrance. Listen to your Tayi. Be like the jungle flower that despite blooming unseen, untouched … still gifts its sweetness to the breeze.

“My darling child,” she whispered, “my precious sun and moon, be the orchid that perfumes the wind.”

A thousand gold sovereigns,
Devi bartered desperately in her head, even as the men of the family lifted Tayi from the bed and placed her upon a mat on the floor. The bamboo bottle of Kaveri water was brought down from the prayer corner. A little was poured into a silver tumbler, and tufts of garike grass and tulasi leaves floated in it. They poured some of the sacred water into Tayi's slackened mouth as, in low voices, Chengappa and his wife began making arrangements for the funeral dancers.

As the shadows shortened on the ground and the sun climbed higher in the sky, Tayi slipped finally from them all.

Devi stood alone now in the dim kitchen. She shut her eyes and leaned against the door, so wracked, so torn apart with grief that it was impossible to weep.

A chill wind gusted about the courtyard, slicing through the mist; women shivered and drew their shawls closer. Devi's lips moved with unspoken prayer, her face utterly drained as she watched the men of the family ready the bier. Devanna limped across the verandah, anxious to be by her side. She looked up
briefly as he approached; their eyes met for an instant, clouded by an identical grief.

Tayi's corpse was lifted gently onto the bier and, one by one, the men of the household came forward to shoulder it. Nanju was at the front, his eyes swollen from weeping. Appu, somber and drawn, stepped alongside him, but as he bent to lift the bier, Nanju thrust out a hand.

“No.”

A single word, and hardly loud, but in the momentary hush of the drums, it sounded like the crack of a cattle whip.

“What?” Appu bent and tried to shoulder the bier once more.

Nanju's hand shot out again. “By blood, Appu. By
blood,
” he said tautly. “Tayi was
my
blood, not yours. You know the tradition. Only blood relatives may touch the bier.”

Appu looked around at the startled, watching crowd. He turned to Nanju and tried to smile, but his muscles felt stiff, frozen. “Nanju, come now—”

“By blood,” Nanju repeated. His lips twisted. “This is not yours to have.”

“She was my grandmother, too,” Appu said bitterly, but his voice lacked conviction, as if he was not fully convinced of the words himself. “She was just as much mine as she was yours.”

Devi watched, shocked from her stupor, as her two boys, their heads shaven, squared off in the fog.
As lovely as Baby?
Nanju had asked.
As pretty a wife as Appu's?
Her face grew tight with anger.

“Move aside, Appu. Don't make me—”

“Make you what? Make you
what
?” Appu grabbed the front of Nanju's shirt, suddenly so angry that he forgot the watching mourners. “You think you're above me, is that it? Me, the orphan taken in, while you are to the manner born? Let me educate you on your bona fide origins.” The words that Appu had overheard all those years ago danced on the tip of his tongue, hot as coals.

Take a long hard look at him,
he had heard Devi say to Tayi in the kitchen.
Remember, as I do every time I see him, just how his father's seed was implanted in me.

He had not understood the implication of Devi's awful revelation,
not until many years later. Appu had hugged the knowledge to himself, shielding Nanju from the devastating hurt he knew that would follow. But now … he stared furiously at Nanju, the words trembling on his lips. Then abruptly, his anger turned to confusion. This was
Nanju.

Nanju.

After that long journey back from Berlin, after all that had happened there. Despite that first, welcoming sight of Tiger Hills, despite Avvaiah and Appaiah, it had only been after Appu had laid eyes upon Nanju that it had truly sunk in that he was home.

And now it was
Nanju
who was laying him out naked. He looked at the rows of gawking faces.
My father was the tiger killer,
he wanted to shout.
The TIGER KILLER. I am no abandoned orphan, I am the son of Kambeymada Machaiah, bravest, most honorable, the last tiger killer of Coorg.

His ears filled with that sound again, of mutton being pounded.
Tshack tshack tshack.
The sound he had been trying to get out of his head ever since … He had stood by, the son of the tiger killer, and watched them pound the pretties to a pulp. He had stood by and done
nothing.
Appu looked desperately around him, his breath coming fast despite the chill in the air.

“Nanju,” a distressed Devanna intervened. “What are you doing? Appu is your brother.”

“Tayi was my blood, not his.”

“Nanju!” Devi's voice cut sharp as a knife. “Have you lost your mind?” She stalked toward her sons, head flung high but still barely even reaching their chests. “If you don't know better than to create a scene, to pick a fight with your brother now, the most inopportune of times, then blood or not,
better he a son of mine than you.
”

Nanju flinched, as if she had reached up and physically slapped him. He looked about him, taking in the shock on all their faces—Appaiah, the uncles, aunts, numerous cousins, and there, Baby,
Baby,
bright as a pearl.