Tiger Hills

by Sarita Mandanna

  With such a large family, over fifty members living together, and an endless stream of visitors, there was always something to be done. Apart from the preparation of the day’s food—in itself a gargantuan task—there were children to be cleaned, fed, disciplined, and pampered, the retinue of servants to be directed, and sheds of buffaloes to be milked. There were rows of rooms to be swept and cleaned, mounds of laundry to be sorted—“Whose underclothes are these now? They all look the same”—dogs to be cared for, shanks of game to be cured, pigs to be fattened, vegetable plots to be tended, and the pumpkins, cucumbers, and brinjals to be carefully stored in layers of banana leaves and hung from the eaves of the wooden-floored attic.

  Devi took on the task of sweeping the floors each morning and sterilizing them with a paste of fresh dung from the cattle sheds. At this early hour, the house was serene—the clamor of voices, the click-clacking of wooden slippers through the rooms, and the crash of pots and pans from the kitchen not yet begun.

  She worked without a sound, like something slipped from a dream. Each morning she would pause, momentarily halt her sweeping, outside the room where the bachelors of the family slept in a row of rosewood cots. Had he returned, she wondered, from wherever it was that he had gone the previous evening? She would lay her hand on the door, as if to sense the heat of his breath, to feel the beat of his pulse through the distance that separated them. She would stand there, listening intently until the ache in her heart grew unbearable. Then she would turn away and begin to sweep again, her broom arching noiselessly across the floors.

  They had spoken only once. She was returning after replenishing the box of soapnuts in the bathhouse when he accosted her.

  “Why?” he asked scathingly.

  She stood looking at him, her eyes huge and dark.

  “I know something must have happened. What?”

  You be silent, Tayi had said to her. Swear to me that you will never breathe a word of what happened to anyone, anyone at all, ever. She had grabbed Devi’s hand and placed it on her own head. Swear on my life that you will keep this a secret, or by Iguthappa Swami and all the ancestors, may I be cursed for the next nine lives to follow. May I be born a servant, may my body be ridden with pox, may sorrow dog my every step.

  “Why, Devi?” Machu asked now. He stepped closer, his fists balled at his sides. “Was this nothing but a game to you?”

  She stood woodenly before him. Look into my eyes. You are my breath, my being. The ripples of my passing, the shadows of my soul. Look into my eyes and read the things I cannot say. Know, you must know I could never betray you, not if I tried.

  She opened her mouth, heard her voice as if from a great distance. “Someone may see us.”

  The lines around his mouth turned white. “Someone may see us? Is that all you can say? That is what worries you most, what if somebody were to see us? Why did you tell me you would wait?” He was livid with rage. “Why did you give me hope? Was I just your passing fancy while you waited for your doctor finally to summon the courage to declare himself ?”

  “Machu—”

  “You waited until my back was turned, until you knew I would be gone, and then you pounced on him as soon as you could. Does he know about me, Devi? Does he know how you slipped out in the middle of the night to meet with me? Do you tell your educated, intelligent husband, do you tell him as he reads to you, do you tell him in your big marital bed how you bloomed to my touch?”

  He bent his head close to hers. “Tell me,” he whispered in her ear, “does he keep you satisfied?”

  “What’s done,” she said, her voice shaking, “is done. If you think so little of me—”

  Machu laughed, a harsh, curdled sound. “It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it, what I think of you? What’s done is indeed done. Well, sister-in-law,” he said, “I wish you and your husband a lifetime of happiness.”

  At the village shooting contest later that month, Machu was so drunk he could barely raise his gun to his shoulder. His shot went wide, missing the mark by a mile.

  A month went by slowly and then part of another. Devi was three weeks late before she realized her monthly blood was yet to arrive. She counted and recounted the days on her fingers, but there was no mistake. She sank upon the edge of the bed, trembling with revulsion.

  She began stealing into the kitchen each morning, boiling cinnamon and turmeric, hastily gulping down the water before anyone saw her. When that did not work, she gathered the unripe papayas fallen to the ground in the vegetable plot, hiding them under her sari in the folds of her chemise, to eat in the privacy of her bedroom. They had given her such cramps that night that her groans woke Devanna. He hurriedly lit the lamps and tried to examine her. “What is it? Where does it hurt?” he asked anxiously, pressing her abdomen. She slapped his hand away.

  “Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me, do you understand?”

  The cramps had finally subsided, but there was no bleeding; the pregnancy had survived.

  Devanna barely slept that night from worry. The next morning, he secretly followed her into the kitchen and when he saw her retching outside he guessed. “Are you pregnant?” The light in his face dimmed as he spotted the cinnamon brew boiling on the stove. “And you want to terminate the pregnancy.” He swallowed. “Please, Devi,” he said quietly, “I know I deserve every ounce of your hatred. I know I will never be able to forgive myself for the atrocity I committed.” His eyes filled with tears. “But, Devi, I beg you, don’t take it out on our child.” He prostrated himself in front of her, not caring who might walk in on them. “Do as you will with me, but do not harm an innocent life.”

  Devi said nothing as she backed away from him, but from that day on she gave up trying to rip out the life that clung like a barnacle within her. She lost even more weight in those initial months, then gradually the nausea ended. Her waist began to thicken, the tautness of her stomach gave way to a little potbelly, and it was not long before the women of the house guessed. When they announced the happy news at dinner, Devanna was at once subjected to much backslapping and ribaldry. Machu said nothing and barely touched his rice.

  Devi went home for the confinement, the first time she had visited the Nachimanda house since the wedding. Thimmaya folded his hands in blessing as she touched his feet, at a loss for words. The house had grown quiet after Devi left, a shifting in the quality of light that permeated its windows, a stillness creeping into its bones.

  He had held stoic all through the wedding. Not a tear had he shed, even when the wedding party had departed to the Kambeymada home with his precious child. It had been only once, many months later, that he had crumbled. He had not slept all the previous night, his thoughts filled with Devi, as they had been ever since the wedding. To get Devanna and her married had been the only recourse left, he told himself again, the only means with which to protect his daughter’s honor. It swam before him again, the memory of her face, so expressionless, as she had sat at the wedding altar. Her eyes vacant, devoid of their customary fire, barely a flicker of recognition as he blessed her with a handful of rice and pressed a gold sovereign into her hands. He shifted restlessly, thinking of Muthavva. “What would you have me do?” he silently asked his long-dead wife. “You’d have done the same.”

  He had tossed and turned until, giving up on his sleep, he arose, deciding to start the day’s plowing earlier than usual. The fields were deserted and still. Muthavva’s breath was in the trees, the scent of sampigé in the air. Up and down he had furrowed, directing the bulls forward, his feet sinking into the rain-washed earth. “I tried,” he whispered desperately to his dead wife. “Why did you leave, how was I to be both father and mother?” The breeze lifted, as if in response, tugging at his hair. “I tried,” he said again. He leaned against the plow, the oxen placidly flicking their tails as the sobs burst from his chest, no one to hear him but the softly sighing breeze.

  “It does my heart good to see you, kunyi,” he said heavily now, “it does us all
good.”

  Tayi never did ask when the child was conceived, whether it had been before or after the wedding. Neither did she comment on the unhappiness dimming her granddaughter’s eyes. Best to let bygones be bygones, she thought. She is a grown woman now, she will see sense soon enough. Besides, is there any gloom in the world that an infant cannot disperse?

  The village came to visit, bearing with them vast parcels of curd rice and the nine meat, chicken, and vegetable curries that were customarily required to appease the appetite of a pregnant woman. Devi lifted her head then, proudly. Tayi sat by, listening without comment as she laughed a little too loudly and recounted to the visitors the pleasures of married life, the goodness of her husband, and the grand Kambeymada house. The sprawl of the fields from the carved windows in every direction, as far as the eye could see, the numerous servants, the enamel washbasins ordered from England. There was no golden spittoon, contrary to the rumors, but the family owned no fewer than three of beaten copper.

  The infant slipped out of her with minimal fuss, in the middle of the day, waiting until the midwife had been summoned from the village, as if he were trying to cause his mother as little inconvenience as possible. Tukra’s wife brought a bale of hay from the courtyard and Chengappa’s wife and Tayi spread it across a cot, smoothing a sheet over it. They slung a rope through the rafters, and handing Devi its ends to hold onto for support, they sat her on her haunches upon the sheet. The midwife spread Devi’s knees apart and, feeling with a gentle finger between her legs, nodded in satisfaction. “Not long now,” she said. “Push, kunyi.”

  “Push!” they encouraged, and on the fifth try, out he came.

  “A boy,” Tayi cried, “it’s a boy!” She bent over Devi, pushing the damp tendrils of hair away from her forehead. “My flower bud, ah, my precious child, you are a mother now, to a healthy, beautiful baby boy.” Thimmaya fired his gun in the courtyard, a single shot to announce the happy news of his grandson to the village. Chengappa’s wife plucked some stalks from the castor plant growing by the cattle shed and fashioned a miniature bow and arrow. She placed these in the crib beside the baby. “May you be keen of eye, fleet of foot, and of faultless judgment,” she said, reciting the ancient blessing as she kissed the top of his downy head.

  Tayi looked anxiously at Devi, who lay staring at the rafters. “Here, hold him, kunyi,” she said, placing the baby in her arms. Devi looked at her son, at the red, wrinkled face, at the minuscule fingers and toes, each capped with a perfect half-moon nail. She had produced this human being. She gazed wonderingly at the stub of the umbilical cord still protruding from his abdomen, at the thimble-sized penis. It was from her loins he had sprung, perfectly formed, fully jointed. She looked at the broad, high forehead, the large eyes so unmistakably like his father’s. Pain shafted through her then, great, swamping waves of grief, and Devi began to weep.

  Devanna came rushing to the Nachimanda house to see his son. He rocked the baby clumsily in his arms, loath to give him to anyone else, until Tayi almost had to pry the child away. He hung over Tayi’s shoulder as she burped the infant and swaddled him in layers of muslin, reaching out time and again to stroke his son’s head until the baby balled his fists and wailed in protest. “Cheh. Leave him be, Devanna,” Tayi chided.

  “Sons are a heritage from the Lord,” Devanna quoted, beaming from ear to ear, “children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth.”

  Tayi asked him, then, if all was well, and Devanna looked at his feet, the smile wiped from his face. “She needs time, Tayi,” he said finally, his voice raw. “Our son … things will get better.”

  They named the baby Nanjappa. Three months later, when it was time for Devi to return to her marital home, Tayi hugged her tight. She tucked a dot of lampblack behind Devi’s ears and in the middle of the baby’s forehead. “Be well, kunyi,” she said, tears in her eyes, “my sun-and-moon, be happy. Forget the past, it is gone. Look to what you have now; count the many blessings you have been given.”

  When they arrived at the Kambeymada house, the family welcomed this newest addition to their folds with a bounty of blessings and gold sovereigns. Machu had contrived to be absent that day, but on his return he, too, presented Devanna with a quarter sovereign to celebrate the birth of his son.

  She had spoken so little before the baby’s birth that nobody noticed how listless Devi had become. If anything, after she produced a child, the women seemed to accept her into a secret club she had not previously realized existed. They included her in conversations in which Devi startlingly discovered that there was virtually nothing too private to discuss. The most intimate details of their marriages, the most personal of their husbands’ foibles—everything was aired in the kitchen. When they prodded Devi for the spicier details of her own marriage, however, she shook her head and smiled.

  A strange lassitude began to slide into her days. She couldn’t seem to feel anything—neither joy nor sorrow, anger nor laughter. It was an effort even to think or to remember the simplest of things. She looked at her baby every morning and was gripped by a vast indifference. He lay in his crib, cooing and gurgling up at her as she absently stroked his head. The other women told her how lucky she was, he barely cried, her son, what a little angel. Would you look at him, they said, truly like his father, a miniature Devanna, both in looks and in gentle temperament. Devi’s milk barely came forth before it had dried up and here, too, the child had been most accommodating, taking to diluted cow’s milk without a fuss.

  She hardly saw Machu anymore, he was gone from the house so very often. She began to use the pretext of the baby to hardly step out from her room. What was the point, Devi began to wonder, of any of this? The child, this life, this dull progression of morning and evening. Devanna thanked her every single night for his son, standing hesitantly at the foot of the bed. Every night, Devi turned away to the wall. She wished he would stop. It meant nothing to her. None of this meant anything to her.

  Increasingly dark thoughts began to swim through her head. “Like a flower”—that was what she had overhead the adults say all those years ago, Gauru akka’s hair had floated about her head like a many-petaled flower. Why had she chosen to jump in the well? she wondered absently. She thought of the well in the backyard of the Kambeymada house, its yawning mouth, the obsidian glint of water far below. She imagined herself spiraling downward, the dankness radiating off the moss-covered walls, the patch of sun growing smaller and smaller above her head. Devi shivered.

  She took to walking along the river in the afternoons, when the fields lay deserted. It was a direct tributary of the Kaveri, a fast-moving body of water very different from the gentle stream in the Nachimanda fields, and one that the children were warned to stay away from. If someone were to fall in, she realized idly one afternoon, they would be carried a long distance before their body was found. She stood on the bank, turning this over in her mind, vaguely wondering what she ought to do next. She would sit, she decided. Just awhile, until her head stopped aching. The child was fed and asleep, the morning duties were done, and nobody would be looking for her. She perched absently on the bank. How inviting it looked, the rushing water. Possessed of a strength, a force of will she no longer possessed. Kaveri amma kapad.

  It was said that when her husband, the great sage Agastya, had wooed her, the Goddess Kaveri had accepted his offer of marriage on two conditions. The first was that he never abandon her, not even for an instant. The second, that he never would try to contain her. Agastya had abided by these conditions, until one day, called away by an urgent summons, he had trapped Kaveri in his pot. There she would remain, he planned, until he returned.

  Ah, how he had misjudged his free-spirited spouse. Kaveri had been furious. She burst free from the pot and flowed away, faster and faster, even as the contrite sage chased after her, until finally, she had disappeared underground. Free to go where she pleased, unfettered, unbound.

  Devi remembered the old le
gend as she stared at the river. Maybe her ankles, that was all she would place inside, just to see how the water felt against her skin. She lowered her feet into the water, feeling the impetuous tug of the current willing her to come with it. Like the tendrils of a water lily. She touched her fingers lightly to her neck, to the tiny black beads of the kartamani, the dark-jewel chain that every married woman wore. The water tugged again, a little more urgently, and Devi reached behind her to unclasp the chain.

  “I didn’t know you came here, too.”

  Devi jerked upright, nearly losing her balance.

  “Uyyi, careful,” cried the woman, “the current here is especially strong.” It was one of Devanna’s aunts. She made herself comfortable beside Devi without waiting for an invitation. “I like to come here as well. So peaceful.”

  Devi nodded, looking down at the water.

  “Is the baby asleep?”

  Devi nodded again.

  “It is good to have new life in that room again. Happiness. After all that happened … ”

  She looked at Devi’s confused expression. “Surely you knew?” she asked, surprised. “That room once belonged to Devanna’s father and mother.”

  “Gauru akka?”

  “Yes. Gauru.” The woman looked sadly into the river. “It has been many years since anyone has spoken of her in this house.”

  Devi looked down at her ankles, distorted by the current. Gauru akka. It was strange to think she was sleeping in the same bed that Gauru had once lain in as a bride. She wondered if Devanna knew.

  Devi turned to look at his aunt. “What happened?” she asked simply.

  “Between Gauru and Devanna’s father, you mean? What else? The same old drama. Some of the men of this house, my husband included,” she confided to Devi, “are blessed with a little too much virility. The mere touch of a woman, that’s all it takes for them to start pawing and snorting like a bull.” She sighed. “And sometimes one wife simply isn’t enough for them. They need other women. Different women. Gauru … she loved him too much. Couldn’t bear to share him. We all heard the shouting that used to come from that room late at nights, sometimes there would be a bruise on her arm or her cheek the next day. Then one day, she just left.”