Tiger Hills (51 page)

Some weeks ago, he had woke smiling. Olaf and he were fishing by the village lake, searching for the fat bass that huddled beneath the stones. The water lapped warmly against his legs, making him smile.

It had taken him some minutes to realize that it had been a dream, that it was not the lake of his boyhood but something else entirely that had made his legs so wet. He had pushed the blankets away with a cry of disgust, struggling to be free of the sodden sheets. His leg, unaccustomed to the hurried movement, had given way under him. Gundert had fallen to the floor, cracking his elbow against the table as he tried to regain his balance.

He had gritted his teeth against the pain as he tried to hoist himself upright. The sheets kept slipping from his grasp until at last he had been forced to concede defeat.

“Sister Agnes,” he had called, hating how his voice quavered. “Is anyone there?”

They had bustled in, exclaiming in concern. They helped him into a chair, pretending not to notice the nightshirt that had ridden high during his fall, laying bare his shrunken thighs. “Please don't worry, Reverend,” the Sister had said, briskly changing the sheets, “this used to happen to my uncle, too. Happens to a lot of us, what to do? Not to worry.”

He had said nothing, breathing heavily as he cradled his aching elbow. His ankle hurt, too, but it was nothing compared to the unending humiliations of old age. Agnes bustled out of the room with the soiled sheets, still talking. “Just a minute, Reverend, and I'll be back. We'll get you back into bed in no time at all.” He was precariously close to tears.

The mission sent a new priest to stand at the helm of the school, a robust, enthusiastic sort with large yellow teeth and a braying laugh that could be heard all over the school. The mission committee had sent an official to explain the replacement. “You have done well here,” the man had said, clapping Gundert on the shoulder, “but it is time perhaps for new blood,
ja?
”

Gundert had braced himself for just this encounter, he had gone over in his head a dozen times how he would frame his arguments.
When he opened his mouth, however, his voice sounded reedy, petulant. “New blood? Does the mission not see how many years I have spent here?”

“Of course we do. You have done well,” the man reassured him, “but your work here is over. Go home. God knows, if I could, I would leave tomorrow.”

Gundert had been unable to remember any of the rebuttals he had so painstakingly prepared. He sat distraught in his chair, and when the mission official took his leave, the man had clearly noticed the tremor in his fingers as they shook hands.

They had let Gundert remain in his apartments for now, but it would not be long, he knew, before the request came, politely worded, for him to move. Nagged by a persistent fear that someone somewhere at the mission would seek to send him back to Germany, Gundert began to pray for release. Every day in the morning and at dusk, he limped painfully to the chapel where, clutching his rosary and prayer book, Hermann Gundert pleaded for benediction. “Enough,” he whispered. “Take me to you while I still have control over my senses.”

He had been shuffling toward the altar when he had fallen again, tripping over a section of the jute linoleum that had mildewed and frayed along one edge. So befuddled was he by the sudden loss of balance, it had taken him some moments to realize that he was lying on the floor. A shooting pain swept up his lower back, and he fainted.

The news of his fall spread like jungle fire, amplified by distance and third-party accounts, until people began to throng to the mission, convinced that the Reverend lay on his deathbed. Hans shuttered his trading shop and insisted on stationing himself at the foot of the Reverend's bed, weeping noisily and blowing his nose as Gundert feebly patted his arm and tried to comfort him.

The doctors pronounced the patient weak but essentially stable, however, and as the days went past, the stream of visitors trickled to a close. The nuns even managed to reassure a bleary-eyed Hans, and to the collective relief of the town, he reopened his store.

Gundert remained confined to his bed. It was as if the fall had jarred something loose within him, as if overnight the iron resolve he had always managed to tap within himself had turned porous and weak. The doctors said he was lucky not to have suffered any broken bones, but nonetheless, it was a terrible effort to lift himself from the bed.

“Aren't you going to see the Reverend?” Devi asked Devanna. She had felt a pang of sadness when she had heard about the fall. Her own father had passed away six years before, unexpectedly, in his sleep. Devi had wept bitterly, yet she had been grateful that Thimmaya had been spared the abuse of old age. Poor Reverend, with only strangers to care for him. “Go,” she urged Devanna, “he will be happy to see you.”

“No,” Devanna mumbled, clutching his book so tightly that the veins stood out in his wrists. The Reverend had made it abundantly clear that he wanted to have nothing to do with Devanna. If he wanted to see him, Devanna knew the Reverend would have sent for him long ago.

Gundert's health continued to deteriorate. He began to drift in and out of the past, conducting conversations with the ghosts that seemed to lurk in his room. It greatly upset the nuns, but Gundert had ceased to care. Could they not see his mother sitting there in the chair, knitting by the fire as she always did in winter?

There, look, his father, fiddling yet again with his spectacles. Once or twice, he had almost caught sight of Olaf, there, just beyond the curtains, but no … not yet. Not yet.

And there. The Korama, fiddling with Gundert's desk. The priest chuckled to himself. The wily tribal knew, oh he recognized, all right, the value of the bloom that lay within. His thoughts drifted. How he had tried to find the flower.
Over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar, through blood, through fire he had wandered …
Not always alone, though. Dev …
his
Dev. Gundert turned his head toward the windows, lost in happier times.

It had been a productive morning, Devanna recalled, despite his own fall. The Reverend and he had been exploring the low-lying hills to the west of Mercara. They were returning with masses of promising plants when, with a great thunking of bells, a herd of cows had appeared round the bend of the trail. Heads lowered, they cantered in front of a skinny cowherd who was clearly in a rush. “Come, Dev,” the Reverend had said, amused, “let us move aside before we are trampled.”

Devanna had slipped on the loose gravel. Luckily he had fallen forward onto his hands and knees, and apart from a nasty-looking scrape on one knee, he had been all right.

Still, the Reverend had been concerned. They were at least two hours from the town, and it did not take long for cuts to become infected here. He cleaned the wound as best he could with his handkerchief. “Do you have any water?” he asked the cowherd who, quite forgetting his earlier hurry, had halted to observe the proceedings.

The boy shook his head, the bubble of green snot protruding from one nostril threatening to shake free at any instant. He had bent to examine Devanna's wound, and then, abandoning his cows, had raced into the adjoining thicket.

He reappeared moments later, carrying in his grimy hands five bulbs yanked freshly from the soil. “Wild turmeric!” the Reverend had exclaimed. “Of course. It is a natural antiseptic. Why did I not think of it?”

“Jeder Jeck ist anders,”
he had said ruefully, as the cowherd smashed the turmeric bulbs against a rock and smeared the paste onto his protégé's knee. “Every lunatic is different. Never forget, Dev, that every idiot is special, and might yet surprise you.”

Turmeric!
Devanna thought to himself now, jolted from his reverie. Mightn't that work against the coffee borers? And what if he bolstered this with leaves from the neem tree, another natural antiseptic? Devanna devised a paste of turmeric and neem that the workers applied to each infested coffee branch. They watched the
plants anxiously for the next two days, but there seemed to be little change. The third morning, the workers called excitedly for Devi. She hurried into the estate. Around each treated coffee bush, there lay what appeared to be fat white droppings. “What … ?” Devi bent down, peering through her glasses. “That boy,” she said, to no one in particular, “he has gold in his brains, that's what.”

The turmeric paste had achieved the impossible, poisoning the larvae until they had tried desperately to crawl from their nests, collapsing at the base of the plants. A huge sense of relief surged over Devi. The crop that year would be saved. She looked up at the cloud-crowded sky.
“We will be fine.”

She ordered two chickens to be cut that evening, grinding the coconut herself for the curry.

The estates steadily recovered. Devanna, however, found little comfort in the role he had played in salvaging them. He limped miserably about the garden as news continued to drift in from Mercara and the mission. The Reverend was withering away; it was as if he had lost the will to live.

Call me to you, Reverend,
Devanna begged silently,
send me a sign. Please, just the smallest sign you have forgiven me.

It was Appu who found the bamboo flower.

Egged on by his cronies at the Club, Appu had discovered a voracious appetite for the hunt. They would drive into the jungle, armed with new smooth-gauge rifles, with cheroots tucked in their shirt pockets and silver flasks of brandy to celebrate the kill. Nobody was surprised when at this sport, too, Dags proved to be a natural.

They had left Tiger Hills early that morning, but the hunt had yielded little except two meager waterfowl. Appu impulsively decided to change the hunt into an overnight affair. “It'll be fine sport, chappies,” he said. “Let's leave the car here, the terrain's too difficult for a vehicle in any case. We can camp somewhere,
and continue the hunt tomorrow. Mother has packed enough provisions for an army—we'll have more than enough food for the night.”

He sent two of the servants back to Tiger Hills to inform them of the change in plan. Then, shouldering his rifle, he plunged into the jungle. Buoyed by his assurances and confident stride, the hunt party straggled behind him, but despite a crashing in the undergrowth that suggested a wild boar, they found little to show for their labor. They camped, before it grew too dark, by a clot of bamboo where the servants built a large fire and set about roasting the fowl.

Appu awoke early the next morning. A band of sunshine, still tentative in its assault, had nonetheless managed to slip through the tree cover and now shone directly onto his eyelids. He muttered under his breath, turning his head, but his sleep was broken. He lay there for a while, and then sighing, opened his eyes. It was then that he spotted the flower, protruding from a slender shoot of bamboo. Rolling to his feet, he crouched before the bloom, using the blade of his pocket knife to push the petals this way and that. The flower was massive, larger than anything he'd seen. And the perfume …

With a deft movement, Appu sliced the flower from its stem and wrapped it in his pocket square. It would be a handy trifle at the Club later that evening, he thought, a gift for one of the pretties.

“Come on, you lazy arseholes,” he hollered, kicking over the embers of the campfire, “time we got out of here.”

They were nearly ready to leave when Appu thought of Devanna. Mightn't the flower interest the old man, too? Going back to the bamboo, Appu tugged repeatedly at it, finally managing to yank it from the soil, a single, barely opened bud shivering on one of its nodes.

When he arrived at Tiger Hills, he found an irate Devi waiting for him at the gate. She had barely slept from worry. All night in the jungle, had he gone mad? Was he trying to send her to an early death? Just because his father had been a tiger killer, did Appu
think he too could saunter into the jungle as he pleased? Had he not heard that a rogue elephant had killed one of the workers on the neighboring estate not two weeks ago?

“Come, Devi, he's returned safe and sound,” Devanna began, trying to deflect her anger, and then he stopped cold, staring at the plant that Appu casually held out to him.

The flower lay upon its shroud of white silk. Devanna longed to reach out and touch its faded petals, but he knew the Reverend would not approve.

“Maybe you, Devanna,” the Reverend was saying, “will be the one who will help me find it.”

“The bamboo flower,” Devanna whispered hoarsely. “Reverend … the sign … ” He smiled then, a smile of such absolute happiness that it dissolved the shadows from his eyes.

The palsy in his hands was even more pronounced than usual as he prepared a pouch filled with earth and gently placed the root of the plant into its temporary home. Along with the plant, he enclosed a note, one that would need no explanation, containing only three words.

He sent the driver to the mission, with express instructions to hand the plant to a nun and
make sure
that it got to the Reverend. He could barely focus that afternoon, halfheartedly weeding the garden before giving up and limping back and forth along the drive, waiting for the summons that would surely come.