Tiger Hills (43 page)

It was Tukra who filled them in on the details later. The elephants had charged the workers, goring two of them to death and flinging three more into the rain ditch that flanked the road.

Devi tried talking sense into the workers. What had happened was tragic. However, she pointed out, elephant encounters happened all the time in these parts. It was bound to happen with the estate lying as close as it did to the jungle. No, shivered the survivors, this was no chance encounter. It was retribution, precise and pointed. How had the elephants known to target
only
those of the party who had stood guard in the estate? They refused to stand guard any longer, and nothing she said could sway them.

She had barbed wire installed, reinforced with sharpened bamboo and broken glass. The next morning, the elephant tracks spoke for themselves. The beasts had uprooted two athi trees that bordered the fence. When the trees fell, they had dragged a section of the fence down with them. The elephants had then calmly crossed once more into the estate. Before leaving, they had left Devi a parting gift—tracts of trampled coffee bushes, wrenched from the soil and flung contemptuously aside.

She knew when to concede defeat. She had the workers cut down the jackfruit, every single one. Some fruit she bade them take home to their families. Twelve of the fattest she saved for the pantry, a few to be set out at teatime with honey, some to be made into jam, and the rest to be julienned, sun-dried, and then crisped golden in hot oil and tossed with salt and red chili powder. The majority of the fruit she had heaped in piles by the side of the estate. It was a conciliatory gesture that the elephants seemed to accept; by the next morning, the fruit was gone. Devi nodded with satisfaction as she surveyed the mess they had left behind, of
stubbled green jackfruit skin, seeds, and chunks of unripe fruit. “Burn this mess,” she ordered the workers. “And now that the elephants know there is no more fruit to be had, cut down the jackfruit trees, every last one of them.”

That afternoon, the boys had returned from school to the crash of timber. Appu had hurried at once toward the sound, Nanju but a footstep behind. Appu watched spellbound as the workers sawed back and forth, the sweat running down their backs, two men to a tree. “Ayy,” he called, eyes shining. “Here, let me have a go as well.”

When Nanju, however, saw the trees trembling under the assault, and the sticky ooze of sap from their torn bark, he had turned pale. He backed slowly away from the workers, his ears filled with the awful groaning the trees made as they crashed to the ground. Turning abruptly, he had raced toward the house. “Nanju,” Appu had called, surprised, “where are you going?” He had started to follow him, but just then another tree had fallen. With a whoop of excitement, he had turned back to the workers. “Didn't you hear me? Give me the saw, let me have a go!”

Devi had looked up in surprise as Nanju burst into the kitchen. “What is it?” she asked. “Why has your face become small as a rat's?”

“The trees,” Nanju mumbled. “I … I don't like to see them fall.”

Devi turned back to stirring the jam. “It's necessary, kunyi,” she said, amused. “Do you want the elephants to return next season?”

“They look … the trees look like old men being cut down.”

“Oh, don't be silly!” It came out sharper than she had intended, but really, sometimes Nanju could say the most foolish things. “Old men indeed.”

He stood there, biting his lip and fiddling dismally with the pile of double beans that Tukra's wife was shucking. Devi sighed. “You can be
such
a child.” Unlocking the doors to the pantry, she took out two laddoos and set them before him. “Here,” she said, “eat.” He shook his head and she could see he was close to tears.

“Nanju,” she began, trying to keep the exasperation from her voice, when Devanna limped into the kitchen.

“What's this? Why the long face?”

Nanju told him about the trees. “Ah, the felling.” Shifting his walking stick, Devanna bent forward awkwardly to ruffle Nanju's hair. “Your mother is right, you know, we need to fell them. I'll tell you what, though, let's make a birdhouse, Appu, you, and me. We'll use wood from each and every tree that has been cut down today, a memorial of sorts to remember them by. What do you think?”

Nanju looked at his father. “A birdhouse? How?”

“Ah, let us see now, we need to plan. I have just the book to help us …” Still talking, Devanna led Nanju from the kitchen. Devi stared at the laddoos lying untouched on the granite counter, reminded suddenly of an afternoon long ago. It had been a jackal, hadn't it, that had got into the chicken coop? Those poor chicks, how she had wept for them. And the funeral that Devanna had organized later that afternoon. The sparkling crab stream, a coffin, fashioned from leaves and lined with silk cotton.

Suddenly upset and not knowing why, she picked up the laddoos and flung them into the rubbish.

Devanna sent both boys through the estate to find the oldest tree that had been felled, the one with the most number of rings on its stump. “By its side,” he told them, “that's where we will build.” The birdhouse had taken nearly seven weeks to fashion, a large, ornate structure fitted with multiple birdbaths and feeding stations. Devanna had Nanju and Appu fill the basins with water, corn, and seed, and he placed a small nugget of copper in each of the baths to stave off algae. After only a few hesitant runs past and through the birdhouse, the visitors had come. Onyx-tailed drongos and white-rumped mannikins, purple-winged coucals, red-whiskered bulbuls, and olive-backed woodpeckers, thronging the basins and filling the area with song.

That
was where Nanju would be for sure, thought Appu now, as he made his way into the estate. “Nanju!”

“Shh.” Nanju turned toward him, half-frowning, half-smiling,
a finger on his lips. “Stop crashing about like an elephant, you'll scare away the birds.”

“Didn't you hear Avvaiah calling for you? Here's your milk.” Appu flung himself on the grass beside his brother.

Nanju noted the depleted contents of the glass and gave Appu an affectionate cuff that knocked the latter's cap off his head. “What?” Appu exclaimed, reaching for the cap as it rolled in the grass. “I didn't take any!” He dusted it off and perched it jauntily on his head once more. “Well, maybe just a little,” he confessed, grinning.

Nanju shook his head with amusement. He took a sip, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand and handed the glass to Appu. “Here.”

Both brothers leaned companionably against the jackfruit stump, soaking in the sunshine and passing the milk between them as birds cooed and called overhead and splashed in the baths, sending droplets of water shooting into the air.

It had been almost four years since they had moved permanently to Nari Malai, soon after Machu's widow had left Appu with Devi. Everyone marveled at the change the child had wrought in her, his arrival snapping her out of the stupor of the previous months. Fired with a renewed sense of purpose, she had had the Mercara house repainted and ordered a new set of furniture from Mysore. Nonetheless, something had been lacking. And then she had had an epiphany—why, it was the house itself! Devi had disliked the house from the moment they had moved there, but somehow, in all these years, she had never entertained the thought of leaving. At first there had been little money to afford a more suitable home. And later, when there was more than enough, she still had not moved. Partly, it was apathy, stemming from the sheer familiarity of the house, grown in these intervening years around them like a cocoon. And partly, it was a deliberate embracing of her distaste for the house, her contempt for its dim, cramped rooms. She had clutched this to herself, thornlike, the daily discomforts a perverse marking of all that had passed, everything that was never to be.

Appu was the charm that broke the spell. Devi had looked at the house with renewed disgust as she held him in her arms. Dark as an abattoir, it was, she thought uncharitably, thanks to that butcher landlord of theirs, the smell of fish and chicken fat seeming to permeate its very bones. Why, she wondered astonished, had she not thought of moving before?

“Nari Malai,” she had announced brightly to the family. “We will all move to the estate. Did you know your father was a tiger killer, kunyi?” she asked, turning to Appu. “Killed a tiger practically barehanded, he did.”

“Devi … what about Nanju's schooling?”

She hadn't looked at Devanna as she replied. “It's all arranged. I have ordered a new automobile from Mysore. We can hire a driver who can take him into Mercara each morning.”

Nari Malai! The boys had been tremendously excited at the notion of living on the estate, but nonetheless, when it was actually time for them to leave Mercara, Nanju was suddenly sad. It was Devanna who had found him, lying curled on the floor under the bed. He had thrown back the covers and laughed. “Now, who do we have here? Come out, you little fugitive, come on, before your Avvaiah finds you.” He had drawn Nanju toward him. “I know how you feel,” he told him gently. “After all, this is the only home you've known. But we're going to a new home now, there's the estate for you and Appu to romp about in—”

“Are you happy to go, Appaiah?” Nanju had asked.

“Your mother is happy,” Devanna had replied simply, “and that is all that counts.”

And indeed, after a very long while, Devi was happy. This was
happiness,
not merely the absence of unhappiness or the shuttering of grief, like an iron cover dragged across the yawning mouth of a well. This was HAPPINESS; unexpected, unwarranted, a counter, partial but a counter all the same, to everything that had happened before. Joy unfurled within her until she would stop abruptly, mid-laugh, terrified it would all be snatched away from her again.

In the early days, she would hurry to the boys' bedroom, heart
pounding. There she would stand, by the side of their bed, frightened out of her wits, filled with the mad certainty that just like that, Appu would stop breathing, like
that,
in a snap of the fingers, he would be taken from her. “I know it, I know it … ” and then Appu would turn in his sleep, smiling at some dream. Slowly her panic would subside. His chest would rise and fall, rise and fall, her eyes lulled by the hypnotic rhythm of it; Devi was filled with a love so fierce that the breath caught in her throat.

She had managed very nearly to forget that Appu was born of another woman; it was only sometimes, when he turned his head suddenly or looked up at her in that way he had, that she was reminded of his mother. However, even that sharp burst of angst was quelled when Appu began to call her, none other than her, Avvaiah.

Once, soon after he had arrived, she had been returning from the estate when Nanju had run out to welcome her. “Avvaiah is here, Avvaiah is here.” Caught up in the general excitement, and mimicking Nanju, Appu had shouted along with him. “Avvaiah is here!”

Nanju had suddenly, uncharacteristically, turned on Appu. “She is
not
your Avvaiah,” he'd cried. “Don't call her that.”

Devi didn't admonish Nanju, had only laughed as she scooped Appu into her arms. She kissed his cheek. “This silly Nanju. Not your mother, he says. Of
course
I am your mother. And you, my sun and moon, are my precious, darling child.”

The move to Nari Malai was for Devi the final piece of the puzzle. It was Machu's land. It was as it should be that his son grew up there. It was important that Appu learn every fold and turn of the property. That the trees recognize his footfall, that the breeze that blew through the coffee bushes should know the contours of his hands, the timbre of his voice.

The family had settled so fully into the estate, it was hard to imagine that they had ever lived elsewhere. Devi had the bungalow repaired and a new roof put in. The old wasp-ridden rubbish pit had been filled in, and she had had an outhouse built in its place, fitted with blue-rimmed chamber pots. She
commissioned an artist from Mysore and had him paint a huge mural of a tiger in the nursery; it watched fiercely over her boys as they slept.

Nanju and Appu had taken to country living like two fish released from a pond into a flood. Off they'd run into the estate as soon as it was light, scampering through the coffee until the plantation pulsed with their laughter. Devi would listen from the verandah and smile. Sometimes when she looked at the sky, she imagined she saw the faint outlines of a warrior, his rifle resting in one hand, his odikathi raised high in the other. “Your son is home, Machu,” she'd whisper then. “
Our
son … he is where he belongs.”

She talked often of Machu to Appu. “He died fighting,” she would say, as they walked through the verdant acreage, her boys and she. Nanju and he grew very quiet as she talked of the battle that had been waged in the mountains far away. “A death most honorable, the death of a warrior. Your father … he died a hero, kunyi.” Little Appu would walk very straight as he listened, his shoulders unconsciously drawn back, his fists taut at his sides. She would take his hand then, gently prying the fingers loose as she gestured about them. “He is one of them now, the veera that protect this land.”

When Appu turned six, Devi had arranged for him to be admitted into the mission school as well. “Talk with the Reverend,” she had said to Devanna. “I don't know why you have not stayed in touch with him. Contacts matter.”

Devanna had remained silent but at her urging, he finally sat down to write to the Reverend. It was a difficult letter. Draft after discarded draft later, he had opted for a formal tone, one that merely pointed out the unfortunate circumstances under which Appu had fallen into their care. He talked of the heroism of the boy's father, even offered to get a reference from the regiment if it would help. His nib hovered for a while over the letter as he signed off. In the end he chose: