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He had stood before her, remaining strangely withdrawn when touching Devanna’s feet as well.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 w
as 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.
The expression on her face, shock, distaste, and something else, something unbearable … the pity as she glanced briefly at him and then looked away at Appu. Nanju’s mouth opened, he tried to say something to his mother—WHY do you do this to me, over and over?—but the words were locked in his throat.
“Have you gone deaf ? The bier. Appu and you together—”
Looking neither to his left nor his right, Nanju stepped away from the bier.
The two boys left immediately after the funeral, tension lying thick and unfamiliar between them all the way back home. “I need a drink,” Appu said tersely to Tukra as soon as they reached Tiger Hills. “Tell them I’ve gone to the Club.”
Devi and Devanna stayed a few hours longer with the family before returning. He looked worriedly at her as she sat silently to one side of the Austin. The windows of the car were rolled down. Usually she hated even a breath of air to pass through the glass; it blew her hair in a dozen different directions, she complained. Today, though, when the driver leaned to roll up the windows, she had lifted her hand. “No,” she had said quietly. A brisk breeze swept through the car, carrying with it the promise of an early winter and whipping Devi’s hair about her face.
“Avvaiah.”
Nanju was waiting for them in the portico.
“Nanju—” Devanna began anxiously.
“Avvaiah,” Nanju said again, cutting off Devanna as the driver leaped to open the car doors.
“Avvaiah,” he said a third time, and at last Devi heard him. “You insulted me. In front of everyone, talked to me as if I were a servant.”
Devi looked at him wearily and then, shaking her head, walked inside the house.
“Don’t you walk away.” The words were like bullets, ricocheting off the hallway and stopping Devi in her tracks. “I am your son, Avvaiah, your son. Your blood. Is that not important to you?”
“Not now, Nanju,” she said tiredly.
His voice cracked. “I know you’ve always loved Appu more, even when we were children. I used to lie awake in bed, did you know that? Pretend to be asleep and watch as you came into our room and stood by our cot. Always on the side where Appu slept, standing over him and watching him sleep. What about me, Avvaiah? What about me?”
“Nanju, please. All this drama—”
“This drama? Every single time, you think first of Appu. I am your son. Me.”
“You are both my sons, equally,” Devi said tersely. “Appu is your brother, or have you forgotten?”
“Nanju, monae, what is all this, what’s got into you?” Devanna pleaded. “Calm down. We’ve barely bid Tayi farewell. This is hardly the time.”
Nanju turned toward his father, the words bursting from him. “This isn’t the time, it never is the time. Quiet, Nanju, hush, Avvaiah has a headache. Hush, Nanju, Avvaiah is busy. And you, Appaiah, what about you? She has no time for you, either. She has never cared for either of us, don’t you see? Not you and never me, no matter how hard we try. Why do you just sit there and do nothing?”
Something snapped within Devi. “Yes, Devanna, why don’t you answer our son?” she spat. “Tell him why you take it, tell him why you do nothing, tell him just how and why we were married, why don’t you?” She whirled toward Nanju. “You want to know what you are to me, Nanjappa? You are a curse. So that every day when I look at you I am reminded of all that is lost.” The words flew like poison from Devi’s mouth, festering with grief. “Every time I look at you, I am reminded of what could have been. A curse, a punishment, that is what you are to me.”
They stood shocked in the aftermath of her outburst, all three of them still for an instant, and then she reached for him, realizing just what she had said. “Nanju,” she whispered.
He was staring at her, ashen. The shadowed meaning of his mother’s words shifting, twisting over his skin. Tell him, she had said, just why we were married. He turned toward Devanna, as if for support, looking to this father, so cherished, so beloved, surely so beyond reproach, and saw the anguish, the guilt in his eyes.
“Kunyi,” Devi pleaded. “I did not mean—”
Nanju’s face crumpled. He thrust out a hand, as if to hold her at bay, and rushed up the stairs.
Devi retreated to her room. The things she said, the things she had said. She sat on the edge of her bed and reached shakily for the jar of cream. She twisted it in
her fingers, but the light was dull and the starbursts in the glass seemed blunted and opaque. It slipped from her grasp, rolling onto the floor.
Devi began to weep then at last. For all that had happened, all that was lost, for Tayi, Tayi, don’t leave me, not you as well, DON’T GO. She drew her legs beneath her, curling small and bereft upon the woolen blankets. Clouds moved across the sky, thick and amorphous, and a soft rain began to fall.
A visibly unstrung Devanna tried to reason with Nanju. “Monae, please, everyone is very upset right now. We’ve just lost Tayi; your mother is hardly in her right mind.”
Nanju couldn’t bear to even look at his father. “She never wanted me.”
“She loves you. She always has. You are her son.”
Nanju shook his head, trying valiantly to hold back his tears. “I have to leave. I have to.”
“Where? Monae, please—”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I cannot be here any longer.”
He left that very afternoon, his face white and drawn as he bent to touch his father’s feet. Devanna pressed something into his palm. “If you will not change your mind,” he said miserably, “then at least keep this.”
It was an old silver amulet. “It was your mother’s. She wore it as a child. She gave it to me many years ago.” The amulet lay gently glowing, light and shadow pooling in the faded prayer that scrolled across its face. “There hasn’t been a day since that I have not kept it near me. Take it,” Devanna said shakily, “as a token of both our blessings.”
Nanju looked as if he might refuse but then mutely placed the amulet in his pocket. He left then, walking out into the fitful rain. The trees sighing as he went down the drive, as if bidding farewell to this beloved son, this quieter brother who had always loved them the most.
A songbird began to trill somewhere in the estate, fluting into the falling rain.
When Appu returned from the Club, his lips tightened when he heard what had happened. Without a word, he turned the car about and raced after Nanju, tracking him down in Mysore.
“I am done with Tiger Hills,” Nanju said quietly. “You should leave.”
Tiger Hills Page 41
