Tiger Hills (59 page)

“Everyone says I look like you,” Baby said shyly.

Devi laughed with pleasure. “Maybe so, maybe so, but I lost the flush of youth some time ago.” Seating herself on the bed next to Baby, she cocked her head to a side, listening to the raucous sounds of merrymaking below. “Appu and his friends. Such a boisterous lot … ” She patted Baby's cheek. “Still, now that you are in the house, he will improve his ways. You give me a grandchild soon, you hear?”

Baby blushed and Devi smiled. “God bless you, kunyi,” she said again. “God bless the both of you with all happiness.” Her eyes grew clouded. “I only wish … I wish all of the family had been here.” How she had hoped that Nanju would return for the wedding. “Your great-grandmother,” Devi said. “If only Tayi had lived to bless the wedding.”

“Don't be sad, maavi,” Baby said softly. “Tayi is here with us.”

“Yes, kunyi, I know.” Devi straightened her shoulders and tried to smile. “They all are. Tayi, my parents, Appu's father—our ancestors, watching over us.”

Baby nodded, anxious to ease the other's hurt. “Yes, they are, Tayi especially.
I saw her today, maavi.
” She looked earnestly at Devi. “Right at the back of the guests when we were leaving for Tiger Hills. Tayi. Standing there and waving at me, bidding me farewell.”

Devi looked startled. The girl was gazing wide-eyed at her, her eyes clear and limpid. A faint misgiving began to uncurl in Devi's chest. “It is very late,” she said abruptly, rising to her feet. She patted Baby on the cheek again. “Try to get some rest. From the sound of it, it will be a good many hours before your husband comes to you.”

Baby bit her lip as Devi left the room. Her mother had warned her not to talk of spirits and the dead; people did not understand, she said. But Baby had only been trying to help. She knew how sad Devi was over Nanju anna's sudden departure … besides, Tayi
had
been there.

Troubled, Baby rose from the bed in a rustle of silk and went to the window. Light spilled from the drawing room, casting patches of gold onto the lawn. She could hear the sound of glasses clinking. Laughter, much laughter, the high pitch of a woman's voice. Baby frowned. When would Appu come upstairs? She was filled with a sudden, fierce longing. She turned her palms upward, holding them toward the light. The dabs of bridal henna had stained her skin a deep, vibrant maroon. She turned her palms this way and that, examining them, and her lips curved in a smile. The richer the stain, it was said, the stronger the love a husband would have for his wife.

It was almost four in the morning when Appu finally entered. “Baby?” he said softly. “Where … there you are, my lovely bride. What are you doing by the window?”

She looked at him, reproach in her kohl-rimmed eyes.

“Come. What is this? You saw my friends, they have come from Madras, from Bangalore, a few even from Bombay. I couldn't very well leave them and disappear, could I?” He smiled and lifted the veil from her head. “Ayy, wife. You were all I could think of downstairs.”

She looked at him again, with those sooty black eyes. “Wife,” he said softly again, savoring the roll of it against his tongue.

The first light of day was filtering wispily in through the lace curtains when Baby laughed out loud. Appu cupped her mouth with his hand. “Hush.” He grinned, the dimple flashing in his cheek. “Do you want the entire household to hear?”

She shook her head, her eyes dancing beneath his palm, but as soon as he removed his hand, she laughed again.

She ran a hand down his back, the damp warmth of it. The two of them, entwined like this, limbs and trunks and skin, hard to tell where she ended, where he began. The smell of him, like moss in the rain. She turned her head, tucking her face into his neck, breathing him in. Her friends had been entirely right, she thought happily, she would get very little sleep.

“Again,” she whispered, moving slowly under him, “again.”

Chapter 39

1930

B
aby gazed enchanted at the toe rings that she had first slipped on as a bride. They flashed silver in the sun, their intricate whorls broadcasting to all the world that she was now somebody's wife.

“Admiring them again, kunyi?” Devanna asked, amused.

Baby blushed and sheepishly shook her head. Devanna chuckled as he turned back to the flower beds. She glanced surreptitiously at him and then touched a finger to the black beads about her neck.
Married.

Devanna and she were picking flowers for the house in what had become their weekly ritual. The garden was fully in bloom; a riot of color in every direction, an artist's palette upended on the soil. Baby sighed, a soft, contented sound.

The leaves of the sampigé trees rustled in the breeze and she frowned, reminded suddenly of Nanju. It had been his birthday three days ago. Devi had picked a perfect sampigé blossom to place in the prayer corner. “Thirty-one,” she had said at the breakfast table, staring at her plate. “Nanju is thirty-one today.” Neither Appu nor Devanna had said anything in response.

It hung over them, the pall of Nanju's leaving. “Why don't you just go to Bombay and bring him back?” Baby had once asked Appu.

“Because my mother can be as stubborn as a mule,” Appu had replied, “and it seems that in this regard at least, Nanju has taken after her. He'll return, but only when he is ready.”

Baby looked at Devanna again. She had grown very fond of her quiet, gentle-mannered father-in-law, and it distressed her to see the sadness that sometimes seemed to envelop him like a shroud. Nanju would return; she knew in her heart that he would soon be home for good. And then they would
all
be happy.

“Baby!” Appu's voice carried over the lawn, startling her from her reverie. “Baby, look at the time, we have to leave!”

“Here,” Devanna said affectionately, “hand me the flower basket. You had better hurry—you know how he gets with his hunts.”

Calling out to Appu, promising to be ready in
two
minutes, no more, Baby hurried toward the house, toe rings twinkling all the way.

When they returned later that morning, dusty and grimy, a deer and two pheasants lying in the trunk of the car, Appu was brimming with laughter. “You should have seen her, how I wish you'd seen her,” he recounted to Devi and Devanna. “Barely had I downed the deer than our lady here was off and running. ‘I am bal battékara,' she yelled, scaring the living daylights out of the other women as she raced toward the kill. Were it not for my bullet, her screams alone might have put paid to the poor animal!”

“It wasn't like that at all,” Baby protested. “I—”

“You streaked like a flash of lightning before anyone else stood a chance!”

“Oh hush now, stop troubling her,” Devi said as she sprinkled teli-neer on them both to ward off the evil spirits. “It's in Baby's blood,” she stated proudly. “When I was a child, I was
always
named the bal battékara at my father's hunts.”

The beautiful girl is finally here, come to visit her near and dear.

Rubies glittering about her neck…anklets shimmering like the sun…

The beautiful one has come, drenched in a rainstorm she has come.

“What?” Devi asked Devanna, surprised. “What are you muttering there in the corner?”

“Baby,” Devanna said softly to his daughter-in-law, patting her cheek, “at times you remind me very much of someone I used to know.”

“Devanna!” Devi called urgently some days later, as she hurried through the house. “A letter, there's a letter!” In the seven months that Nanju had been gone, now and again there was a letter from him, bearing some little news from Bombay. Devi had pounced on the letter as soon as she saw it in that morning's post. “A
letter,
” she said, when she found him. “Here, quick, read it to me.”

She stood there rapt as Devanna read the brief letter aloud, disappointment clouding her face when he had finished. Once again, there was no mention of a visit, no hint of a reconciliation.

“Is that all?” she demanded. “Are you sure there isn't any more?” Without waiting for his response, she took the letter from Devanna, holding it to the light, turning it backward and forward, this way and that, as if searching for some indication, some hint of Nanju's return that Devanna might have overlooked.

“No matter,” she said then, a lump in her throat. “No matter. He never was much of a one for words.”

She walked slowly down the foyer. She had hoped that in this letter at last … A burst of laughter drifted in from the dining room. Baby was arranging a vast armful of flowers as Appu watched, leaning against the wall, his hands shoved in his pockets.

At least Baby,
Devi thought wanly,
has brought laughter with her to Tiger Hills.

Baby murmured something and Appu laughed out loud again; Devi turned, suddenly desperate for a pocket of quiet. She made her way to Nanju's bedroom. It was the old nursery; Appu had long appropriated one of the larger rooms on the first floor, while Nanju had chosen to remain here, in this room of his childhood. She stared unhappily at the mural of the tiger that still sprawled across one wall. When Appu had left for Biddies, she had braced
herself for the pain of his absence. A mother's pain at being separated from a child—it had felt like a missing limb, a phantom pain that cut deep.

It was different with Nanju. A slower ache, but unexpectedly insidious. Like a leg turned stunted, just a little shorter than the other, dragging perpetually behind. The letter today … how she had hoped that at least now, after all these months, there would be a sign that Nanju was coming home.

Devi sat there, on the perfectly made bed, brooding over her son.

Appu got Baby pregnant. Or at least Baby thought she was, twice in quick succession, over a span of five months. Each time, her face had crumpled when the monthly blood arrived, cruelly delayed by a few days, just late enough to have gotten her hopes up.

“Don't worry,” Devi comforted her, when Baby wept. “Do not fret, kunyi, you are both so young, there is so much time ahead of you.”

Appu sat beside Baby on the bed, and took her in his arms. He kissed the top of her head. “Ayy, my lovely. Stop now, hush. How about I recite you a poem?
There was a young girl,
” he began, tone solemn,

“Who begat three brats named Nat, Pat, and Tat.

It was fun in the breeding,

But hell in the feeding,

When she found there was no tit for tat!”

Baby was silent, puzzling through the words, and then despite herself, she giggled. She pummeled Appu's chest with her fists, and they both started to laugh.

Nanju's letters continued sporadically, growing ever more erratic in frequency as well as content. Once there was only a
paragraph, devoted entirely to the sound of the sea, the way it crashed and tugged against Bombay's shoreline. Another time, he fretted over the lack of the night. “There are always lights here,” he wrote to Devanna. “It is impossible to rest.” Not once did he talk of returning.

The next year, when Appu's twenty-seventh birthday came around, Devi made an offering at the Iguthappa temple in the name of all three children—Appu, Baby, and Nanju. Appu sat on one enormous pan of the balancing scale, pulling a blushing Baby onto his lap, as the priest loaded up the corresponding pan with sack upon sack of raw rice. Devi folded her hands in prayer, watching as the two pans of the scale were finally in perfect balance. “Iguthappa Swami, protect my children.”

They donated the rice to the temple, and Devi gave an additional hundred rupees to the priest. “Pray for my sons,” she asked, “both of them … let them both be home.”

She was in a pensive mood on the way back to Tiger Hills, barely noticing as the car bumped along the pitted roads. Appu, who was driving the car ahead, slowed, pulled to the side, and flagged them down. When Devi rolled down the window, he pointed to his left. “The Kambeymada village, Avvaiah. I told our lady here that it lies along this road, and she wants to visit the old Kambeymada house.”

Devi was about to point out that it was getting late when Baby leaned across Appu, her eyes shining. “May we?” she asked, “Please, just for a short while, I promise we won't be long.”

“Oh, all right,” Devi capitulated. “The two of you go. No, not us, it's late and we're tired.”

Devi sat at her dressing table that evening, combing out her damp hair. It was hard to believe how long it had been since she had last visited the Kambeymada house. Appu and Devanna went each year for the Puthari celebrations, but she refused to go. The house, its grounds … there were too many memories.

She put down the comb, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She touched a finger to the hollows under her eyes. When had these appeared? She shut her eyes, suddenly weary. The ceremony
at the temple had upset her more than she realized. Nanju should have been there. And then, this visit of Appu's to the Kambeymada house. It had immediately brought up memories of the past, rocking her already fragile mood.