Tiger Hills (30 page)

Chapter 20

T
he rains were early and especially perverse that year, washing away the first racemes of laburnums that had begun shyly to dot the hillsides. Clouds hunched beetle-browed over Coorg; nobody, it seemed, could remember when they had last seen the sun. There was hardly a break in the downpour; barely would a bedraggled songbird shake out its plumage and begin to warble, than the deluge would begin again. The placid rills that had skirted the fields were changed into swollen, roaring monsters, bringing down orange trees and vast tangles of pepper vines. Crocodiles began to frequent the streams; one was even found lurking in a paddy tank. Another, fully nine feet long, was shot and killed in the murky waters of the Kaveri; when it was dragged ashore and cut open, a woman's toe rings and silver bracelet were found in its stomach.

Gundert's arthritis acted up, an involuntary groan escaping his lips every morning as he got out of bed. At times the throbbing in his joints was so acute he could barely kneel in the chapel. The novices watched anxiously as he hobbled across the school, but he refused their offers to relieve his inflamed knees with warmed castor oil or poultices of sandalwood paste. The pain was welcome flagellation.

He had not seen Devanna again, not since that awful morning.
Too exquisitely mannered to do otherwise, he had composed letters to both the Nayaks. He regretted his inability to attend the wedding, he wrote, but it was short notice and there was too much to be done at the school. And with that, with the final curlicued flourish of his pen as he signed his name to the letters, Gundert had called on all of his resolve to blank the existence of his protégé from his mind.

The years he had spent mentoring the boy, crafting him into the torch bearer he had believed him to be. The paternal proprietorship so blatantly evident every time he spoke of him, making the novices smile fondly behind their hands.

My Dev.

The unquestioning expectations placed on, reserved for, none but the most deeply beloved. Devanna's ghastly confession, his blood turning cold as he had listened.
You are not of me. You NEVER were, you could never be.
A heartbeat later, a surge of rage, an all-consuming, blistering fury.
Get out of my sight,
he had screamed,
GET OUT.

All of these things Gundert swept aside, like the brittle leaves of some discarded type specimen.

Once again, the Reverend buried himself in his work. Unsmiling, untiring. He sent letter after letter to the mission authorities, asking to be transferred. Until the day when a white-faced novice broke the news to him that Devanna had shot himself. The pain in his chest was so intense that for an instant, he was certain his heart too had stopped.

The mineral stench of the hospital in Madras swirled through the decades to swell around him. The sound once more echoed in his ears, of Olaf, coughing up unending quantities of blood. How Gundert had prayed then, prayed endlessly as he wiped the sputum from Olaf's lips, swabbed the sweat from his ribs.
Save him, Lord have mercy, save him.
And still Olaf had coughed, chest turned concave from exhaustion, coughing to death in front of Gundert's eyes.

“Reverend, did you hear what I said? Our Dev, he—” The novice started to cry.

Gundert blinked. “Let me … Leave me be, Sister,” he said. His voice sounded cracked to his ears, a rusted key turning painfully in its lock.
He too, like Olaf, was gone.
Gundert sat at his desk, looking blankly at the drive.
His
Dev. His fingers rose stiffly, automatically, to the silken cord about his neck. He slipped off the key, opened the drawer in his desk, pulled out the package of silk. He unwrapped the bamboo flower. So fragile, still perfect after all these years,
such delicacy in the delineation of the stamen and pistil.

He rose shakily to his feet. The sleeve of his cassock caught his precious flower, spilling it from the desk. Gundert did not notice. He shut the door to his office, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts as he reached for a volume of poetry from the shelf. Slowly, like a struggling student in one of his own classes, he traced the words with his fingers as he read.

How stern are the woes of the desolate mourner

As he bends in still grief o'er the hallowed bier.

Dev was gone. He had shot himself. What was it about Gundert that whatever he touched, whatever he cherished, crumbled to nothingness?

As enanguished he turns from the laugh of the scorner,

And drops to perfection's remembrance a tear.

My Dev.

The last rites. Gundert snapped the book shut as he remembered. “Sister,” he called urgently. “Sister Agnes, hurry, I must perform his last rites.”

It had taken the persuasive powers of all of the nuns to dissuade him. “No, Reverend, you must not. He isn't a Christian—his family would take it amiss.”

Later, when the news arrived that Devanna was not dead—indeed, he was barely alive, but alive he miraculously was—Gundert rushed to the chapel and fell upon his knees. “Have mercy,” he begged, “spare the boy's life. He has sinned grievously
… but Lord, not again, do not visit this sorrow upon me another time. Take
my
life instead, I give unto you this service, all I possess.”

He knelt at the altar, blue eyes clouded with pain. “I… ” His voice failed him then, in the face of the enormity of what he was about to offer. “I promise…,” he started again, and faltered once more, the words choking his throat. Then, mustering up all the will he possessed, Gundert struck an exacting bargain with the Lord.

“I shall never speak another word to him,” he vowed, “not in all the years that lie ahead. I beseech Thee, in return, bestow Your mercy upon him.”

Slowly Devanna began to heal, innocent of the barters made on his behalf by the tiger killer and the priest. Mission-Devanna and Coorg-Devanna bought back from the Gods, both Christian and pagan. His breathing eased and the fever abated as the open lips of the wound began to pull together.

Dr. Jameson shook his head again in wonder. “A miracle, that's what it is. That and the fact that the patient is young.” It appeared that the boy was going to make a full recovery.

Devanna regained consciousness one damp afternoon.
The rain, pattering down on the roof. When would it end? So many days…He had to go and see Devi. When would the rains stop?

“Where … ,” he whispered, his tongue like cotton.

“Shhh, monae. Don't talk, you need to rest, you've been very ill.”

Tayi's wrinkled hands stroking his brow. His throat felt raw. “Devi … ?”

She was standing by the window looking at him. Those large, lovely eyes so dark, so riddled with pain. Devanna blinked as he remembered.
It has always been him.
It was more than he could take, the despair in her voice. To know that he was responsible for placing it there. The solid weight of the barrel against his chest. He had had to maneuver awhile before he had got the gun aligned. The sound of the drums, the chanting from the courtyard.

Even at this, he had failed.

Devanna suffered a major stroke that evening. Jameson diagnosed a clot that had likely traveled to the brain. What a pity, he said, just when he was headed for a complete recovery. “I am truly sorry,” he told Devi, running up and down her with a practiced eye. Not bad for the youngster, to have snared himself such a bonny one. “I'm sorry, but your husband—one side of his body is paralyzed.”

The transfer order that Gundert had so petitioned the mission authorities for finally arrived; he quietly turned it down. “Mercara shall be my final post with the mission,” he wrote to the authorities. “I shall stay here as long as you deem it fit for me to do so.”

Fevers began to claim their victims, a life plucked here and there. Pallada Nayak collapsed in the paddy nursery where he had gone to survey the seedlings despite the remonstrations of his daughters-in-law. He had been shouting at the Poleyas, “Ayy, donkeys, do you have stones for eyes, cannot you see that the seedlings need more manure?” when, overcome by a fit of coughing, he had slipped in the ankle-deep mud and hit his head on the stones that edged the bank. He had never recovered, simply sinking deeper and deeper into unconsciousness. They did not tell Devanna.

Devanna's condition gradually stabilized, and he was discharged from the clinic. Nonetheless, it was advisable, Jameson recommended, that he remain in the vicinity. “Just in case, you understand? Relapses are not uncommon.”

Kambeymada Nayak bought a house for Devi and Devanna in Mercara. It was a low, dark, unfortunately planned structure that had been built by a Muslim trader. The man had thriftily hoarded the coins he had earned, first from selling river fish, then from chickens and great, fat-streaked slabs of goat meat. His savings had been translated over the years into no fewer than three houses that he had built in Mercara and a thriving clothing store
—fine wedding silks, cotton lungis, best funeral purpose muslin
—in the heart of town. Although his talents did not, unfortunately, stretch to
architecture, the house did have one redeeming feature—a set of large windows in the front room, set with imported embossed glass and boasting a panoramic view of the town. Devi hardly noticed, giving her new surroundings only the most cursory of glances as she admonished the men carrying Devanna into the house. “Carefully, go gently,
carefully,
he is an invalid.”

Thimmaya gave his daughter the services of Tukra the Poleya servant; the latter and his sardine-seller wife settled into the little shack tacked on at the bottom of the house. Tukra gave Devanna a massage with hot coconut oil every morning, kneading and pulling at the slackened muscles, maintaining a steady flow of chatter as he bathed the invalid and dusted his skin with talc. It was a hodgepodge conversation, a nonsensical cuckoo's nest of words. The latest gossip from the shanty, lamentations over the paddy fields he had left behind—the town was so crowded, too many people for Tukra, no space to lie flat on one's back and contemplate the sky—and recountings of the decidedly one-sided arguments with his wife. Once a fisherwoman, always a fisher-woman, he grumbled to Devanna; they never did lose the shanty lungs developed from screaming out their wares.

Tukra knew he talked a lot of rubbish, but Devanna anna enjoyed their one-sided conversations, Tukra knew that he did. A man needed to be spoken to, did he not? And Devi akka … Tukra would never say anything of course, it was not his place, but she did not spend as much time with her husband as she ought to. So busy she was, all the time doing something or other. She made sure Devanna anna's meals were prepared meticulously—none but she was allowed to mash his bananas or cook his rice gruel—but a wife sometimes needed to place her hands upon her husband's arm, did she not, to sit by his side, to lay her head on his chest?

Whenever these distressing thoughts crossed his mind, Tukra drowned them out with even more babble, mumbling away as he dressed Devanna and lifted him gently into the wide-armed planter's chair that faced the living room windows. Devi did not like to have the windows opened: the rain in Mercara fell almost horizontally, she complained, it took barely a minute for the room
to be flooded. Tukra knew, though, that Devanna enjoyed the rains. He would carefully open the windows, barely a scratch, really, to let in the fresh, moisture-rich air. They would sit there, dampness dancing on their skins, Tukra squatting on the floor beside Devanna and reaching mid-soliloquy to wipe the saliva that pooled at the corner of Devanna's lips. Until Devi would pass by and slam the windows shut with a sharp cry of impatience.

What was Tukra doing, dawdling by the windows? Was there so little work for him? Who would go buy the milk for that day, her?

Tukra would sheepishly scurry off then while Devanna would give no indication that he had heard. There he would sit, in the wicker-bottomed chair, staring blankly ahead as the wind beat its palms against the shuttered windows and the bells from the mission church tolled ponderously over the town.

The only times they managed to elicit some reaction from him was when Devi sat Nanju on his father's lap. Nanju would reach up to pat Devanna's cheeks with his fat toddler hands, covering his face with little-child kisses. There was a slow animation about Devanna then, a contortion crossing his stiffened features as he tried to smile at his son. Devi would pause, distracted momentarily from the all-consuming rigor of cleaning, disinfecting, and cooking that she had set herself. She would stand in the doorway, watching the two of them, a tender, almost wistful expression on her face. The anger coiled unspoken beneath her tongue, the years stretching meaningless ahead; these things seemed momentarily laid to rest as she watched her son reach for his father. And then, propelled by a sudden bitterness, she would stalk over to them and snatch up Nanju. “It's time for his nap. Tukra, here, ready him for bed.”