Tiger Hills (26 page)

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 legend 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.”

She snorted. “A man is like a dog, dipping his snout into every ditch, but he will always come home in the end. If she had only looked away, she would still have him. What did it amount to, this great love she had for her husband? A sodden ending in the well. And he waited not six months before he was married again.”

The woman sighed again. “One has to live, not run away from one's problems. One has to fight for happiness. It isn't easy for a woman, I am the first to agree with that. But where is the sense in throwing everything away? One must fight.”

She turned and looked back at the house, shading her eyes against the sun with her palms. “I should go check what is happening with the dinner,” she said, and rose creakily to her feet.

Devi looked up at her briefly and smiled. “Go ahead,” she said. “I am right behind you.”

She remembered how softly spoken Gauru had been. It was hard to imagine her raising her voice at anyone. She had been waiting, Devi realized, waiting in vain for Devanna's father to come and take her home. Like a flower, everyone had tut-tutted, a many-petaled lily, and then they had moved on with their lives.

One has to fight for happiness.

Devi looked at the river for a long time, at the currents urging her to slip forward.
One must fight.
Moving very deliberately, she withdrew her feet from the water. Rising from the bank, she turned and walked back toward the house, her damp footprints flaring briefly upon the grass before vanishing in the sun.

Chapter 18

T
he sari that Devi chose that evening was of simple cotton, but it was tinted a delicate pink. “Oh, what a pretty color!” one of the aunts exclaimed. Devi smiled.

“Someone told me,” she said softly, “that it reminded them of the roses that grow wild in the hills.”

Machu stiffened, his hand making a small, shocked movement at her words.
Like a rose,
he had said to her once,
this color on you, you look like a mountain rose.
His lips tightened and then, deliberately drawing his plate closer, he continued to eat in silence.

He was away for the next two days. The evening of his return, Devi contrived to spill the gravy from the mutton curry onto his sleeve as she was serving him. “Just see what I went and did,” she exclaimed, her hands flying to her cheeks in chagrin. “Here, let me.” She reached for his hand, heart pounding, her fingers closing tight about his as she poured water over the stain.

Machu snatched his hand away. “You do not need to go to such trouble,” he said, his voice even, despite the muscle jumping in his jaw. “It will wash off easily enough.”

So it went for the next few weeks, as Devi plied her wiles. The darkness that had so clouded her lifted, leaving in its place a manic, single-minded purpose:
Machu.

She washed her hair and sat in the courtyard, just beneath the
window of the room where Machu slept, to dry it. The sun caught in the unbound silk of it, spinning shine through its length. At dinner, where once she had hardly paused over what to wear, she now agonized over her wardrobe. She began to wear flowers in her hair once more; her slender ankles were adorned with silver. The breath stopped time and again in Devanna's throat as he looked at her, and in the other men of the family, too, as they glanced shyly toward her. Machu's lips would tighten, the only indication that he had even noticed her presence.

Devi did not know what she would say to him, or how she would convince him, or indeed what it was that she must convince him of. Perhaps the intent, the seed of what was to follow, was already there, buried deep within her. Devi, however, was little inclined to such introspection. All that mattered, with fevered, hammering urgency, was
now.
This moment, every minute they stayed apart, each hour wasted, every day that Machu and she could have,
should have,
been together.

Whether Machu was puzzled, or shocked, or even angered by her overtures, she did not know. His only response was to pull back even more, to disappear for ever greater stretches of time from the Kambeymada house. And when he returned each dawn when Devi swept the floors, she paused outside the room of the bachelors. She pressed her palms against the shut doors, her thoughts, her being, focused entirely on him, reaching through the wood.
Yours. I am yours.

It was some weeks later that Machu's appearance caused much consternation among the women of the house. He had been gone these past few days to Mysore, and when he returned in the middle of the day, the back of his kupya was torn and muddied, the fabric marred with dark stains of what looked like blood.

“Nothing, it's nothing,” he reassured them. “I slipped down a gully, that is all.”

“Took quite a tumble, too, from what I can see,” one of the older women said, worried. “Let's get Devanna, he'll know what to do.”

“No! No,” Machu repeated, his tone more even this time. “There's no need for anybody. Is there turmeric in the kitchen? That's all I need, it's just a scratch, believe me.”

“Turmeric? No, no, you need something more, here, look, you are still bleeding.” One of the women flapped away to Devi's room, where she was putting Nanju to sleep. “Devi! Devi! Where is your husband? Machu anna is here and he is hurt.”

Devi rushed to the kitchen, her face white. He was still surrounded, trying valiantly to calm the women. She stared anxiously at him; he glanced at her and immediately looked away. “Please, all of you, there is no cause for concern … no medicine, no doctors. Just give me some turmeric and I will be on my way.”