Tiger Hills (35 page)

“So be it,” he said at last. “Try turning over the land to paddy instead. Let's start clearing it of coffee, acre by acre.” He injected a confidence he did not feel into his tone, tugging purposefully at a length of rotting vine. “It won't be easy, but when did hard work ever harm anyone?”

They held a small pooja at the estate the next day, breaking a coconut at the entrance and spilling its water into the soil. Tayi had Tukra wring the neck of a black fowl and bury it in a corner of the estate, to ward off the pisachi and their evil eye.

“We need a name, Avvaiah. What should we call our estate?” Nanju asked, gazing about him in wonder.

“Nari Malai,” his mother immediately responded, her face aglow. Tiger Hills.

Devi sold the oranges from the estate and with the proceeds hired three workers, with whose help she planned to clear a few acres of coffee. The going was slow and arduous. The woody stems of the coffee bushes had to be hacked through and their roots wrenched
free from the soil. Devi's nails grew ragged and torn as she slogged alongside the workers, blisters erupting on her palms. And yet, after months of labor, from when the sun rose in the east to when the stars began to speckle the evening sky, barely a patch of the estate had been cleared.

Devanna watched from his chair as she sank onto the edge of her bed one evening, so fatigued she could barely think. All these months he had not said a word, even as he chafed at the thought of her toiling there, at being unable to help, and the limitations of his broken body. “Talk sense into her,” Tayi had urged him. “This is a fool's errand, to try to turn the estate around. Sell the land while there is still some value in it; buy some paddy fields instead.”

Devanna had hesitated. “The estate … it is this land that she seems to want, Tayi, this and no other.”

And so he had held his counsel, sitting anxiously by the window each evening until she returned. Devi never gave any indication that she noticed, let alone appreciated his vigil. Still he waited, pretending to be absorbed in a book while she made sure Nanju was tucked in tight, had her bath, and lit the prayer lamps. Only when she finally sat down to her supper would he, too, begin to eat. They ate in silence, both of them. He picking at his gruel, Devi swallowing desultory mouthfuls of whatever it was that lay on her plate. The house so quiet they could hear the mice scrabbling in the walls.

Today, she had been too exhausted to do anything but retreat to her room. Devanna waited then rose hesitantly from his chair. He limped toward her door, breathing hard from even this small exertion.

“Devi,” he rasped. “What is it? Is it the estate? Can I help?”

She glanced wearily at him. “Help? Really, Devanna? How else are you going to
help
me?”

Nonetheless, she told him about the estate. “Coffee bushes, nothing but coffee,” she said bitterly. “Even the pepper vines are rotted from the rains. It was too much to undertake, to try to turn the land back to paddy. The money from the oranges has almost
gone and we have barely made any progress. I … I don't know what else to do.”

“Coax a coffee crop instead. The newspapers say that prices are not bad this year.”

“Coax a—! The estate has lain untended for years. Even the tree cover has grown again. Appaiah says it will cost a great deal to clip it back. Where is the money going to come from? And so much expense for what? A few quintals of yield?”

She looked down at her smarting hands. “I might have to sell,” she said to him shakily.

Devanna was staring at her. “
The trees have grown in?
But, Devi, this could be just what we need.”

Ignoring the pain stabbing his leg, he limped to a stack of books and pulled an atlas from the pile. “Look,” he said.

Devanna's body had slowly begun to solder together over the past year, but he was still far from recovered. It had been a slow, agonizing process. Even shuffling from one room to another exhausted him; he would have to rest in his chair for quite a while afterward, eyes closed, mouth hanging open. Still too weak to venture outdoors for any significant period of time, and with even Nanju away at school, he had desperately sought a distraction to prevent his mind from meandering too deeply into the past.

He had turned once more toward the familiar refuge of his books. Weighty parcels arrived for him every month, from publishers in Bangalore, Bombay, Madras, and London. It was an expensive business, but despite their strained monetary circumstances, Devi hadn't found it in herself to object. When, in fact, realizing the burden his purchases must be placing on their budget, he had not ordered any books for nearly three months, she had noticed. “Why did you stop?” she had demanded. “Don't be silly now, you go and get your books.”

Devanna read voraciously. History, geography, philosophy, religion, mathematics, the sciences, fiction, biographies, travelogues, and most of all, his first love—botany. Training his attention on coffee planting in Coorg, he had set his mind to understanding the puzzling decrease in yields.

A widespread deficiency in the soil, he had thought at first, but no, that did not make sense. Paddy yields had been consistently high in the same period. There had been no epidemics, either, no hosts of pests that could explain the scanty harvest. Even the rain had generally fallen as it usually did, maybe more in some years than others, but nothing that should have so adversely affected the crop.

He had been deep in the middle of a memoir by a planter from Ceylon when it had occurred to him. Could it be? Could it really be so simple an explanation?

“Look,” he said now to Devi, gesturing at the atlas. Devi peered suspiciously at the page, at the latitudes running through India and the neighboring islands. “Here,” he pointed, “look at Ceylon.” The planters in Coorg had made a serious error of judgment, he told her, in following the coffee plantations of Ceylon too closely. “When they removed as much of the tree cover as they did here, I believe they made one fatal error. They forgot that Coorg is situated at a higher sea level than Ceylon.”

The coffee in Coorg was getting entirely too much sun.

Devi gazed doubtfully at him. “Are you certain?” she asked.

He nodded excitedly. “It is only a theory, Devi, but yes, I do think this is the answer. Do you remember that story from the mission school—the one about Jack and his giant beanstalk?” The soil in Coorg was so fertile, he told her, that in the initial years it hadn't mattered. Push a coffee bean into the mud and a plant would have practically sprouted overnight, too much sun or not. Yields had been high in those early days. But as the years passed, the initial advantage of virgin soil had been eroded. The bushes had not been able to withstand the excessive sunlight, the buds withering on their stalks before they could mature into fruit.

“So … you mean that … ” Devi worked through the implications.

“We may not need to trim the tree cover at all. If my hypothesis is right, letting the shade trees grow might in fact be the
best
thing that could have happened to the estate.”

Could it really be? Devi stared at him, weighing her options.
Gold in his brains, she remembered; Devanna's head had always been filled with gold. She rose to her feet, suddenly energized. “So be it. We have so little to lose, we may as well try your way.”

She pawned her wedding jewelry—the bangles Muthavva had left her, the necklaces, and the double chain—at the local jeweler at Mercara. With the rupees she got from him, work began in earnest to coax a coffee crop from the estate. Thimmaya was dubious, but nonetheless he visited as often as he could, showing his daughter the right mix of cattle bone and manure with which to fertilize the plants, how to keep the soil around the plants entirely clear of weeds. Devi labored alongside Tukra, his grumbling wife, and the few workers she had been able to afford. Weeding, hoeing, composting, manuring, hacking, pruning, standing, bending, reaching, plucking until the muscles in her back and her arms cramped in pain.

Still, in some strange way, it was cathartic. There was honesty in the physical labor, with the sun hot upon her face. A bluntness to the blisters the hoe raised across her palm. She didn't know what they would do if, after all this, the crop was a poor one. They always had a home at her father's, she knew, but it was hardly right, placing their financial burdens upon his head. Nanju's school, how would she ever afford the fees? No matter how many towels she edged with lace.

And then Devi would yank even more violently at the weeds. All she could do was work. And work she would. She would work till she dropped, she promised herself. Machu had got her this land, and she would make something of it. “Grow,” she whispered fiercely to the plants as she hoed around their roots, his name bittersweet on her tongue. “Grow now, you hear me?”

She had heard how, when it had come to his share of the property, Machu had elected to receive cash rather than land and had then given all of it to the Ayappa temple. What a staunch devotee, people said of him in awe, but the news had pierced her like a shaft. For him not to have staked a claim to this land. To have chosen, deliberately chosen, to stay rootless. The money taken in
lieu and donated to the Gods was no mere offering, Devi knew. It was a penance, an unending expiation for their past.

She had heard, too, of the birth. Machu's son, a boy, just as she had known. She had had to fight to keep her face composed, to mask the pain from her voice.
Oh? So all are well then, the wife and the baby?

Here in the estate, it was all left behind. Here she could pretend that things were as they once had been. That she remained unmarked, branded by neither fate nor circumstance, her heart wild and unfettered as the wind. That the only thing of consequence was the task at hand, the mulching of the soil with dried leaves to retain as much moisture as possible, the pruning of the bushes and selecting from the many shoots springing forth from a node, the three most promising that would then be allowed to grow. Sometimes, when she looked up, she imagined she saw Machu's shoulders silhouetted against the jackfruit trees. Sometimes she seemed to hear his voice, carrying distinctly through the hills.

It was months later that Devanna's theory was finally proven right. They had been able to tend only a small section of the estate, but nonetheless, those acres burst forth with white, spangled bloom. Devi was astonished by the fragrance of the flowers. Her father had cultivated a small patch of coffee on his land, and she had noticed the delicate beauty of the blossoms, but never before had she realized just how magically scented they were. A honeyed, evocative bouquet perfuming the air for two heady weeks after they bloomed.

The berries that followed were so plentiful that with the money from their sale, Devi was able to pay off her debts at the pawnbroker and have enough left over to afford workers for almost the entire hundred acres the next season.

A year later, Devi stood on the crest of the hill that overlooked the estate, admiring a sea of coffee blossoms. It had rained a few days ago, a strong morning shower that had washed the dust from
the trees and at once tempered the heat. Blossom showers, they were called, these warm rains of March; this year, they had arrived with perfect timing. The coffee had budded the previous month; small spikes of green, each the size of a grain of rice, sprouting in profusion. The spikes had slowly matured in the sun until a mild stickiness had appeared on their surfaces, sign that they were ready to bloom.

That was when the blossom showers had come.

The coffee had bloomed in their wake. Tiny, brilliant white flowers, clustered so thickly that entire branches were covered in ivory, thrusting pristine and spearlike from the green as far as the eye could see. The estate lay before her, heavy with perfume, hugging the swell and curve of the land as it steamed gently in the sun. Its orderly rows of shade trees—orange, jackfruit, and silver oak—yielding gracefully to the jungle knotting the borders. Away in the distance, the bluish haze of the mountains, plumed with clouds. Frogs croaked from the damp grass around the estate pond, and insects, shiny winged, skimmed over the coffee blooms.

Devi had dragged Tayi with her to see the blossoms, triumphant testimony to nearly two years of hard labor. “Cheh, kunyi,” the old lady had protested, “my knees cannot handle so much rough use,” but Devi would hear none of it, getting Tukra to drive the carriage almost to the very crest of the hill. She turned to her wheezing grandmother.

“Look, Tayi,” she said, gesturing with a quiet, determined pride. “Mine. All of this, mine.”

Tayi looked askance at her, trying to catch her breath. “It is Devanna's property,” she reminded her granddaughter.

The breeze whipped around them, molding their saris to their legs. Devi took a deep, satisfied breath, inhaling the fragrance of the coffee blossoms, but saying nothing in reply.

Once again, the blooms were an accurate indicator of the crop to come. When it was time for the harvest, the yield was so high that the drying yard was occupied for almost a month. Its cured surface seemed perpetually carpeted with red-brown berries drying
in the sun; all along its boundary, hillock after hillock of berries lay mounded as they awaited their turn. Tukra sat beady-eyed over this bounty, cheh-chehing as Nanju dove and rolled through the mounds. “Oh, leave him be, Tukra,” an amused Devi intervened. “He's only a child. Besides, there are plenty more where those came from!”

She went to Mincing Lane herself to negotiate the price of the harvested crop with the European consolidators, conducting the discussions in her limited but serviceable mission-school English. Devanna, whose condition had continued to improve, insisted on accompanying her, refusing to let his wife go unescorted. Devi had not objected. He had very nearly fallen as he tried to get into the carriage, righting himself at the last minute and seating himself heavily inside, a stubborn set to his chin, his brogues and walking stick polished to a shine.