Tiger Hills

by Sarita Mandanna

  “You’re so quick to point out at every instant that Devanna isn’t Appu’s father. Think how Devanna must feel when you do so. He’s treated Appu as if he were his own child, from the day you brought him home.”

  “Appu is Machu’s son,” Devi said flatly.

  “And you his mother? I see. So where does that leave Devanna? Or Nanju?”

  “What do you mean? Nanju is my child, too.”

  “Come, Devi. You know you favor Appu, you always have. And yet, has Devanna once voiced his objection? Never, despite the hurt it must cause him.”

  “Voice his objection?” Devi pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples, suddenly filled with anger. “On what grounds? You want to talk about Nanju? Let’s. Take a long look at him, Tayi, remember as I do, every time I see him, just how his father’s seed was planted in me.”

  Tayi blanched and turned to the sink.

  “No, why do you turn away from me now? Is this too bitter a truth for you?”

  Tayi began to sort the pots and pans with a great deal of clattering. “Enough. Why do you insist on raking up the past? It’s gone, Devi.”

  “That’s right. Let’s shut it tidily away, pretend that nothing happened. Yes, the past is gone. Machu is gone, forever. While Devanna limps about this house, a … a constant reminder of everything I have lost.”

  It grew dark outside, the birds suddenly quiet as they hurriedly flew toward shelter. “He has always loved you,” Tayi said, distressed. “From the time you were little.”

  “Love. It must be a misbegotten love indeed, to have caused me so much grief.”

  Tayi’s hands trembled. “Whatever happened, happened. The past is gone. Look ahead to the future. My flower bud, my darling child, be like a flower. The true beauty of a flower lies in the sweetness it carries within, in the perfume it shares with the wind.”

  Thunder rumbled as the first drops of rain splattered into the dust, a cooling whiff of petrichor rising from the estate. Devi massaged her temples again. “My head,” she said tiredly. “I’m going to rest for a while. You’re right, Tayi, I should look ahead. Iguthappa has been kind, and I am blessed. Machu’s son. Appu … I’ve been given the future.”

  From the other side of the kitchen door, Appu detached himself from the shadows and melted silently into the house, trying to make sense of what he had just overheard.

  Devanna awoke in the middle of the night, smiling. He groped about in his mind, trying to replicate the fragrance that had perfumed his dreams, but it slipped through his fingers, note after tantalizing note. He had been jumping, he remembered, across the crab stream, his legs bounding off the wet mud. She was laughing, her laughter the very color of the water, a clear, unaffected silver. He turned his head, still half asleep. Fireflies hung flickering outside the bedroom window, tracing patterns across the velvet of the night. Now on, now off, shifting and rearranging themselves in a myriad sparks of code.

  The bamboo flower! His eyes flew open. The flower the Reverend had shown him all those years ago. He recalled the fragrance still trapped in its dried petals, the heady roundness of it.

  Deeper than a rose.

  Muskier than jasmine.

  Bambusa. Indica. Devi.

  How had he forgotten all these years?

  He slept no more that night, thumping his walking stick impatiently on the floor for Tukra to help him out of bed as soon as the first light streaked the sky. “Quickly Tukra, we have a flower that is waiting to be discovered.”

  When Devi came downstairs, she found to her surprise the coffee workers gathered earnestly around Devanna as he held court upon the lawn. He was searching for a particular flower, he told them, large as his fist and divinely perfumed.

  It was rare, very rare, and grew hidden among the bamboo thickets. “Find one for me,” he told them, “and you will be richly rewarded. But remember, I want the plant, roots and all.”

  The workers waggled their heads, bemused by this odd request but keen to please this master, who always had a kind word for them and their children as he patiently attended to their cuts, sores, and various fevers. They would ask their relatives, too, they assured him, those who worked on other plantations as well as those who still lived among the forests. Someone would definitely find the flower.

  Nanju and Appu clamored to be included in this project. They went traipsing eagerly through the estate and poked at the bamboo thickets that grew by the lake, but apart from two petrified rat snakes that the dogs promptly tore apart, there was little else to be found. “But where is it?” Appu asked impatiently, and Devanna smiled. He raised his cane and pointed toward the mountains, hazy in the distance. “Probably there. But it would be foolish, wouldn’t it, to overlook the possibility of our own estate?”

  Devanna began once more to maintain records of the plants he found, pressing the specimens when his fingers were too stiff to paint. He spent hours referencing and cross-referencing his books, inscribing the species and genus to which each specimen belonged in a copperplate script that sometimes lifted and jerked midway no matter how hard he tried to control his hands.

  When he had exhausted the possibility of finding so much as an undocumented spore on the grounds of Nari Malai, Devanna looked to the neighboring forest. Every Friday afternoon, on the workers’ weekly day off, Tukra drove him to one of the trails. By this time, the boys’ interest had waned. Devi saw the disappointment on Devanna’s face when he called to them and not even Nanju wanted to accompany him.

  “Go with him, donkey boys,” she chided. “So much time you spend roaming around the estate like ragamuffins, why can’t you go with Appaiah?”

  Devanna smiled. “It’s all right. If they don’t want to come, don’t force them.”

  Devi shrugged elaborately. “As you wish. I can’t understand these obsessions of yours. Going to the forest! Be careful. Or have you forgotten there are elephants there?”

  Devanna smiled again and began to say something, but Devi had already disappeared into the house.

  Yet again, the bamboo flower refused to reveal itself. Nonetheless, the forest yielded rich bounty. Devanna found scarlet-tipped orchids that he draped over the trees surrounding the house. He came across vast, secret meadows of wildflowers that he and Tukra brought back by the armful for Tukra’s wife to thread through the links of the prayer lamps and place in brass urns through the rooms. One time he found a hollow filled with sampigé saplings that he transplanted along one side of the lawn at Nari Malai; another time, he came back with masses of wild roses. Slowly, despite no concrete plan to do so, almost by accident, the gardens of Nari Malai that would be marveled at for decades to come began to take shape.

  They were a thing of strange, wild-edged beauty; not for Devanna the manicured perfection of flower beds and trellises. Here there was a wall of the fragrant Night Queen, and by its side a loose-fisted medley of wildflowers. They spread untamed around the base of the large banyan tree that was allowed to reach its vast, parrot-adorned branches across the lawn. There was a rambling rockery, peppered with bonsai miniatures of loose-jacket oranges and wild mangoes. Devanna had the workers bring him the smooth black stones to be found in the rivers, and with these he fashioned an astonishing, many-leveled pond. It started at a height, in a large oval that narrowed at its base into a series of smaller, evenly spaced scallops meandering down. He trained lotuses across the different levels, the flowers pulsing with color against the deep black of the stones.

  There were wild orchids with musky scents and variegated colors draped over the branches, and he had two more birdhouses built, until the gardens of Nari Malai, throbbing with birdsong, became the talk of every social circle, Indian or otherwise. There was only one spot in the garden that was left bare, at the very apex of it. “A flowering plant,” Devanna said when quizzed about it. “One day, that spot will house a very special flower. Someday.”

  He designed an arbor, hewn from timber to his specifications, over which he trained not roses but brilliant spumes of
bougainvillea. If you knew where to look, up, at the very top of the arbor, you would see a faint inscription carved into the wood and all but obscured by the flowers:

  In my old griefs

  And with my childhood’s faith.

  I love thee

  With a love I seemed to lose.

  “What a thing of beauty,” Tayi marveled, gazing at the grounds. She glanced at Devi. “You do know he built it for you, don’t you?”

  Devi grimaced and did not reply, hunched over the accounts.

  “Haven’t you realized? In his choice of flowers, in everything … this garden is you, Devi.”

  Devi looked then at the garden. “There, kunyi,” Tayi pointed. “Did you notice there is no jasmine? He knows you hate it. Look, there. Sampigé instead. And see the rockery—filled with your favorite fruit. And there.”

  Tayi pointed out all the little touches that made up the gardens, things that Devi had been oblivious to.

  Why, there was the wheelbarrow they had played with as children, converted now into a vast freestanding pot of lilies. There, in the rock garden, the small purple stones that could be found in the Pallada village. And look there, a sapling from the mango tree that had grown in her father’s home. Devi looked around, amazed, and then the ends of her mouth began to twitch with laughter.

  “What?” Tayi asked, smiling. “What is so amusing?”

  Devi began to laugh, louder and louder as she looked about her, laughing so hard that tears spurted from her eyes. “Look at us, Tayi,” she gasped, “just look at us.” She gestured toward the flowers. “He toils here all day, all for me, it seems. While my world lies just beyond, there, in the estate. A fine pair we make! Nails filthy from the same soil, each creating our own memorials to the past.

  “Nari Malai! Taj Mahal estate, that’s what we should have called it.”

  She laughed again, pressing her palms to her eyes. “Ah, Devanna, Devanna. He built this garden, he built it for me, he thought of everything, it seems. But you know the one flower he missed, Tayi? Laburnums. Butter-yellow laburnums, twisting in the breeze.”

  Chapter 30

  1915

  I’m sorry, Reverend,” the police commissioner said. He spread his pawlike hands in front of him.

  Gundert stared at him, giving no quarter, his eyes like two chips of blue ice.

  The police commissioner was new to Coorg. “We have orders,” he said, and this time there was a slight sharpness to his tone. “Our countries, after all, are at war.”

  War had indeed mushroomed in the west, casting Europe into shadow. The continent lay divided, trenches furrowing their way like scar tissue across its soil. War most momentous, the papers called it, unprecedented in the history of mankind. The Great War. A war so far-reaching that its reek permeated the globe, its bony fingers stretching, grasping, as far away as Coorg.

  As soon as the war began in earnest, the British government had closed India’s borders, denying all access to Germany. The mission was headquartered in Switzerland, not Germany, its officials had protested, we are neutral, but nonetheless, no more of its men, supplies, or funds were allowed into the country. The edict had largely been met with sympathy. The Coorg planters rallied among themselves, organizing raffles and tombolas to raise funds, and sending anonymous donations to the local mission. Gundert had looked on, touched, as the donation tray after the Sunday Mass came back week after week so loaded with coins it had taken two nuns to haul it into his office.

  The war dragged on, brutal and unrelenting. The German government, seeking to unseat Britain from its colonies, began to fund Indian insurgents. German agents colluded with them in secret meetings held in Berlin, America, and London, supplying them with arms and money with which to oust the British from India. Furious, the British government responded by issuing a clampdown on all imports from Germany. Declaring the Industrial Establishment of the Basel Mission to be a German organization, they confiscated all the factories and industrial works that the mission had set up in India—the weaving looms, the terracotta tile factory, even the printing press that Gundert had worked so tirelessly to set up. All mission personnel were to be interned immediately.

  The police commissioner had made his ruddy, reluctant way to the mission, where he had attempted to explain to Gundert that it was a mere formality, but all things considered, it would be best if the Reverend did not travel outside of Mercara for some time.

  “Yes.” Gundert smiled frostily. “Your uniform, commissioner,” he said, and the commissioner glanced, startled, at his trousers. “Your khaki breeches. Did you know that khaki dye was invented by a predecessor of mine from the mission? The very first khaki cloth to be used anywhere in the world, spun on our looms. The weaving looms that we set up here in India, the very same looms that your compatriots now see fit to usurp.”

  “The war—” the commissioner began, but Gundert reached for his walking stick, pulling himself up from the chair.

  “Thank you for your visit,” he said haughtily.

  That afternoon, he made his way to the trading shop, where Hans was pacing the floor. “Reverend,” he exclaimed, the worry on his face dissolving into a grin. “We haven’t seen you in a while. Here, sit, would you like some water? It’s a long way to walk.”

  Gundert waved away his ministrations, although he was breathing heavily from the exertion. “Have they been here, too, the police?”

  “I must report in every morning to the garrison, they say. Roll call.” Hans shook his bearlike head.

  “Perhaps it is better you keep a low profile for some time, Hans,” Gundert said, troubled.

  “Ah, do not worry. They need this shop in Mercara, ja? They will do nothing to me. Besides,” he said simply, “you are here to look after me.”

  Gundert blinked, then looked away at the interior of the shop to mask how touched he was with this proclamation. He pointed his walking stick at the sparsely stocked shelves. “Are imports coming in?”

  “A few. From my supplier in Malaya, mostly. Difficult to get things from home these days. Still,” Hans said sardonically, “there is so much money here, business has been good.”

  Wartime had proved a boon for Coorg and her coffee. The Allied armies could scarcely get enough of the stuff, it seemed. They ordered vast quantities of coffee beans for their troops: Kona from Hawaii, Robusta from Brazil, and quintal upon quintal of smooth, rich Arabica from Coorg. Coffee prices had already been healthy; they shot to unprecedented heights during the war, and there they would remain for the next decade.

  A new elite emerged in Coorg on the wings of this prosperity, like strippling green underbrush beneath a stately jungle grove. These were the progeny of some of the most respected local families, boasting ancestral histories as long and deep as the Kaveri in flood. They had been educated in Madras and in Bombay, and some even in England. One among them had studied papermaking in Japan; two others had visited New York.

  They returned home with modulated accents and trunks full of porcelain, fine cigars, and back copies of Sporting Life. They demanded their share of the family properties and built on them European-style bungalows surrounded not by the lush banana, areca nut, and orange groves of their youth but cropped lawns perfect for an afternoon of croquet. They pored over catalogues from Jermyn Street and Savile Row, ordered shiploads of Chippendale furniture, and frequented Hans’s store, picking up vast quantities of turntables, painted lamps, and pink-cheeked dolls.

  Husbands badgered their wives to become “modern,” and the women obliged by shearing off their waist-length braids in favor of the latest bobs. Theirs was a shandy-sipping, cigarette-smoking, air-kissing set that threw fabulous teas and knew how to dance the tango. Crinkling their noses at the old Coorg names—très old-fashioned, non?—they rechristened themselves, sometimes with mixed results. Dechamma, Kalamma, Neelamma, and Nalavva became Polly, Kitty, Titty, and Pussy; their husbands, Jack, Joe-boy, Tarzan, and Timmy.

  Their newfound prosperity was not lost on the prag
matic English. So it was that the committee of the Mercara Planters Club, while unanimously voting to continue the Reverend’s membership despite his Germanic origins—he is a Christian missionary, dash it—also passed an unprecedented motion to allow into its fold select members from among the locals.

  It was a stringent process. Any hopeful and his wife had to survive three separate evenings at the Club where they were subjected to intense scrutiny—everything from the way the husband pronounced his aitches and held his goblet of brandy to the manicured tips of his wife’s fingers. If the couple was deemed to be cultured enough, the husband was then invited to a two-hour interview in the King Edward Room. The committee sat with their backs to the window or to the roaring fireplace, depending on the weather, and grilled the hapless applicant on politics, moral integrity, and his ability to contribute—in cash or in services—to the welfare of the Club. Still, despite the stringency of admission, no fewer than fifteen couples became members of the Mercara Club that first year of 1915.

  The committee also approached Devanna. He was one of the wealthiest locals, after all. They sent him an invitation, on thick cream stationery embossed in burgundy. Would he and his wife like to attend an evening at the Club, two Wednesdays from now, at six in the evening?

  To their astonishment, Devanna turned them down. Devi pursed her lips, but said nothing. Gundert frequented the Club; after the way he had refused to acknowledge Devanna when they had gone to seek Appu’s admission into the mission school, she knew Devanna was trying to spare his old mentor the embarrassment of a chance meeting. Besides, Devi had little in common with the Coorg women who spent their evenings there. A flock of sparrows, she thought, tittering in their borrowed feathers. Her world was here, in the estate and with the children. Clubs and suchlike, where was the time for such frippery?

  The war, meanwhile, burned on. “Sentiment is turning increasingly ugly,” the concerned Home Board of the mission wrote to its stations around the world, summoning its missionaries home. Gundert refused to leave.