Tiger Hills Read online

  TIGER HILLS

  TIGER HILLS

  SARITA MANDANNA

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2011. Simultaneously published in the United States by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Copyright © Sarita Mandanna, 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Mandanna, Sarita

  Tiger Hills / Sarita Mandanna.

  ISBN 978-0-1-431-8046-3

  I. Title.

  PR9499.4.M36T54 2011

  823’.92

  C2010-906088-1

  American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

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  For my grandparents

  Kambeyanda Dechi & Muddayya and

  Charimanda Seetha & Biddappa

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to:

  My lovely mother for reading draft after draft with such enthusiasm and insight.

  My husband for his infinite patience and support. My father for his staunch belief in this book. My sister for her objective and unfailingly honest eye.

  Biswarup Chatterjee, Jeff Willner, and Sukanya Dasgupta Roy—critics extraordinaire and friends indeed.

  Pussy Tayi for painting such vivid pictures of a Mercara before my time. My uncle Mani for sharing with me his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of all things Coorg. To Uncle Bobjee and Aunty Titi for their invaluable compilation, the Pattolé Palamé, and for answering my questions in such generous detail. My in-laws, and all the aunts and uncles who took me to old ancestral homes, gave freely from their libraries, and thought up still more people with whom I could speak.

  Ananth Shankar, Deepali Bagati, Kishen and Muthu Nanjappa, Mridu Gulati, Polly Kelekis, Vimmi Singh, and Vrinda Deval for early read-throughs and helping in a myriad different ways. Kuppanda Kalpana Kuttaiah, whose wonderful photograph of her mother’s sari became the border used on the cover.

  The wonderful ladies at DGA: Heather Godwin, Charlotte Knight, Sophie Hoult, and Anna Watkins—efficient, extraordinary.

  Kirsty Dunseath, early champion of Tiger Hills, and the most insightful and constructive editor a person could hope for. Sara Weiss, for believing so fully in Tiger Hills and for her startlingly acute, consistently intelligent editorial counsel—you made this story better. Diya Kar Hazra and Nicole Winstanley for their unwavering advocacy.

  Jamie Raab, Deb Futter, Emi Battaglia, Anne Twomey, Siri Silleck, Giraud Lober, Karen Torres, Linda Duggins, Brad Parsons, and the rest of the team at Grand Central Publishing for all their support and assistance. Every author should be so lucky.

  Finally, to the two people I owe a great deal: David Davidar, without whom this book might never have been, and David Godwin, but for whom it might never have been seen.

  Author’s Note

  Tiger Hills is a work of historical fiction. In writing the novel, I drew on multiple texts to paint a picture of Coorg that tallied, in spirit, with the original. These sources include:

  1. Gazetteer of Coorg, Natural Features of the Country and the Social and Political Condition of Its Inhabitants, compiled by Rev. G. Richter, Principal, Government Central School, Mercara, and Inspector of the Coorg Schools, 1870 edition, reprint 1995 (DK Publishers & Distrs.); 2. Mysore and Coorg, Volume III—Coorg. A Gazetteer compiled for the Government of India by Benjamin Lewis Rice, 1878 edition, reprint 2004 (Karnataka Gazetteer); 3. Coorg Memoirs; An Account of Coorg, and of the Coorg Mission by Rev. H. Moegling; 1855 edition (originally printed by the Wesleyan Mission Press, forms a compendium to the book above); 4. Ethnographical Compendium of the Castes and Tribes found in the Province of Coorg with a short description of those peculiar to Coorg by Rev. G. Richter, 1887 edition (Mysore Residency Press); 5. Report on Education in Coorg from 1834–1882, drawn up under orders from the Government of India, No. 191, Home Department, Dated 9 March 1882 by Lewis Rice, Esq., Director of Public Instruction, Mysore and Coorg; 1884 edition (Superintendent of Government Printing, India); 6. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume IV: From Cochin to Ganguria by W. W. Hunter, C.S.I., C.I.E., LL.D., Director General of Statistics to the Government of India, Second Edition, 1885 (Trubner & Co., London); 7. The Oriental Annual, or Scenes in India; comprising twenty-two engravings from original drawings by William Danielle R.A. and a descriptive account by Rev. Hobart Caunter, B.D., 1836 edition (published for the proprietor by Edward Churton, 26, Holles Street); 8. Eastern Experiences by Lewin Bentham Bowring C.S.I., Late Commissioner of Mysore and Coorg, 1871 edition (Henry S. King & Co., London); 9. The Indian Forester: A Monthly Magazine of Forestry, Agriculture, Shikar, and Travel, E. E. Fernandez, Deputy Director, Forest School, Dehra Dun, Volume XV, 1889 (Thomasan Civil Engineering College Press); 10. The Coorg Tribes and Castes, L. A. Krishna Iyer, Johnson reprint, 1969; 11. The Agricultural Journal of India, Volume I, Government of India, Central Publication Branch for the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research, 1906; 12. Blackwood’s Magazine, Volume 212, 1922; 13. The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War by Winston Churchill, 1898 edition, 2005 re-release date; 14. The Experiences of a Planter in the Jungles of Mysore, Volume I by Robert H. Elliot; 1871 edition (Chapman and Hall, London); 15. Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore, Robert H. Elliot, 2004 re-release date.

  In addition, the quinine extract in chapter 7 was adapted from an article by C.H. Woods that appeared in the Calcutta Gazette in 1896.

  The original author of the newspaper article in chapter 35 is unknown, and is based on material appearing in The Autobiography of Balbir Singh (Senior) by Samuel Banerjee, printed by Vikas Publishers, 1977, and referenced in www.bhartiyahockey.org.

  Finally, a word of thanks to the many poets whose poetry graces the pages of Tige
r Hills: Percy Bysshe Shelley for “Bereavement” and “On a Poet’s Lips I Slept,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning for “How Do I Love Thee,” Sir Walter Scott for “The Lady of the Lake,” Lewis Carroll for “Jabberwocky,” and the unknown authors of some of the limericks in the later chapters.

  DEVANNA

  Chapter 1

  1878

  Muthavva knew her seventh child was special, had known from the very day of her birth, the day of the herons. It was a clear day in July. With almost two months to go before the baby was due, and the sowing season upon them, Muthavva had put off leaving for her mother’s home. She made her laborious way to the fields instead, and was standing ankle deep in the flooded flats when she heard a rustling. She looked up, shading her eyes against the sun and rubbing the small of her back. A flock of herons wheeled overhead. In itself, this was not unusual. There were herons to be seen in every field in Coorg, the flash of their wings startling against bright green paddy. But in all her years, Muthavva had never seen as many as were now slowly descending upon the flats. A hundred birds, maybe more, flying wingtip to wingtip, casting the sun-drenched fields into shadow. The fluttering of their feathers drowned out the croaking of frogs, the cawing of crows, even the incessant racket of crickets.

  Muthavva could no longer hear her brother-in-law’s voice carried on the wind as he called out instructions to the laborers hired to help with the sowing, his words muffled by the steady beat of wings. The birds circled slowly, lower and lower, executing a final sharp turn to land by her feet. Muthavva stood surrounded, still absently massaging her back among a sea of silent white. And then, without warning, the herons took wing again. Up they soared on some secret cue, all around her, showering her with the glittering droplets of water that rolled off their wings and the tips of their feet. At that instant, not one moment sooner or later, Muthavva felt a gush of warm liquid on her thighs. Her daughter was here.

  The mountains. That is what the dead must notice first, Muthavva had always believed. That very first time, when they rose from the funeral pyres, slipping through ash, borne by the wind high into the clouds. And from there, that first, dizzying, glorious sight of Coorg.

  It was a tiny principality, shaped not unlike the knitted bootie of an infant, and tucked into the highest reaches of the Sahaydri mountains that girded the country’s coastline to the south. The far side of the mountains was bounded by the ocean, dropping abruptly into the glittering blue of the Arabian Sea. The way down the cliffs was so slippery, so fraught with loose rocks and sharp-edged shingle, that only the most money-hungry traders were foolhardy enough to attempt it. They assembled twice a year at the edge of the bluffs, in time to meet the Arabian ships docked below, with baskets of captured monkeys whose feet they had painted red with betel juice and lime. They would release the monkeys over the cliffs, driving them down toward the sea with a great banging and bashing of drums; as the monkeys jumped, terrified, from rock to rock, they left behind a map of tiny red footprints for the traders to follow. Even so, each year there were those who fell, men screaming as they spun through the air, finally smashing onto the rocks far below.

  Turning inland, the silver flash of the Kaveri River, ribboning the olivine mountains and parceling Coorg neatly in two like the halves of a coconut. To the north, the undulating hills of bamboo country, softly rounded, dotted with towering arches of bamboo and slender knots of trees. Blackwood and ironwood, dindul and sandalwood, eucalyptus, benteak and rosewood, interspersed with breezy glades where grasses shimmered in the sun. The Scotland of India. That was what the many white folk in Coorg called it, this part of the land that reminded them so much of Europe. They had set about civilizing the central town of Mercara, rechristening its streets Tenth Mile, Queens Way, and Mincing Lane. They clustered their estates about the town—coffee plantations sprung from Ceylonese beans that had rapidly taken root in this virgin soil. Their planter bungalows lay in a series of rough circles around the town. Low slung, red roofed, and diamond paned, replete with verandahs, croquet lawns, and racquet courts.

  In stark contrast, the shola forests of the south. Wild, untrammeled tracts of pipal, cinchona, ebony, toon, and poon, crowding in on themselves, adorned with club moss and lush, unscented orchids. Tangles of thorned underbrush erupted between their trunks, vast, laboriously spun cobwebs bridging the exposed corrugation of their roots.

  Here and there, scattered almost evenly between the north and the south, the local villages. A velvet patchwork of jungle soil, moist, fertile, and dark as the night sky where the forest had been hacked away. Peridotic swaths of paddy flats lining the wetlands by the streams. The sprawling, golden-thatched homes of the Coorgs, each with its designated wetlands and grazing pastures and the telltale wisps of smoke that rose from their hearths into the trees.

  Finally the forest, at the base of the mountains. The thickly knitted toe of the bootie, forming a protective cover over the tip of Coorg that jutted out toward Mysore. This was dense jungle, simmering with a dangerous, compelling beauty, marked only by the faintest of trails. Only the Coorgs knew the jungle trails well, them and the charcoal-skinned Poleya tribals who served them.

  The trails had always been jealously guarded, especially in the old days when Coorg lay under siege. The kings of Mysore had tried for generations to bring this stubbornly independent principality under their dominion. The warfare, the abductions, the forced circumcisions, and the mass executions had served only to unite the Nayaks, patriarchs of the eight most prominent families in Coorg. They had banded together, bidding the clans under their jurisdiction to stand shoulder to shoulder against Mysore. The Coorgs resisted Mysore, digging in their heels and clinging to their land like the copper-colored crabs that burrowed in their fields.

  When the British and their East India Company had finally overthrown Mysore, the Coorgs had rejoiced as one. In the peace treaty that followed, Coorg was ceded to the British. They had taken the measure of this little province, looked appraisingly at its mist-laden hills and salubrious climes so well suited to the planting of coffee. They took note of the Coorgs: tall, fierce hotheads who thought nothing of looking them in the eye and speaking as one man to another. Wisely they had been patient, pushing their agenda with polite, manicured resolve. Eventually, fifty years after they had taken Mysore, the British were formally welcomed into Coorg.

  Still, despite these days of peace and the syenite roads that the British had carved, skirting the edges of the forest to connect Coorg with the neighboring provinces, collective memory ran deep. There was a band of armed and able-bodied Coorgs always stationed at the bend overlooking the entrance to the forest where the road from Mysore met the mouth of the trail. The Nayaks shared responsibility for manning this post, each staffing it with men from the clans under his dominion for five weeks at a stretch except for the three months of the monsoons, when the trails were rendered impassable by mudslides and trees felled by lightning.

  Today, the lookout post was quiet. Men lay snoring in the rough bamboo-and-burlap machan while Nachimanda Thimmaya kept watch. The afternoon wind picked up, gusting through the branches overhead and scattering dried leaves through the machan. Thimmaya shivered, drawing his tunic closer about him. If only he had picked the white cowrie shell this year, curse his luck. When Pallada Nayak, the village headman, had announced the date of the cowrie picking, Thimmaya had gone especially to the Iguthappa temple, offering its all-powerful deity, Iguthappa Swami, a whole two rupees, money he could scarcely afford. He had sacrificed a fowl to the ancestors and yet another to the veera, the ghosts of long-dead valiants. Leaving nothing to chance, Thimmaya had even propitiated the wood spirits with a hefty bundle of pork and rice left in the forest. The day of the picking, when the priest had extended his closed fists toward him, Thimmaya had sent up yet another fervent prayer to Iguthappa Swami. But no, he had pointed at a fist and the priest had opened his palm only to reveal a black cowrie; Thimmaya had been selected once more, three years running, to man the post.

>   This year was especially hard. It was sowing season and every available pair of hands would be needed in the fields. Muthavva should be in her mother’s home, not bending over the paddy, not when her belly swelled round and full with another child. It had been a difficult pregnancy, the dribbles of blood in the early weeks, the pain in her back as her stomach grew. His brother Bopu had offered to take his place at the lookout post, but Thimmaya had refused. Bopu had his own family to feed, and besides, Pallada Nayak would not have approved. He sighed. If the price for cardamom fell again this year in Malabar, the family would have to tighten their belts.

  He was sitting there, lost in his thoughts, when he started. Someone was running through the jungle calling for him. “Ayy. Who is it?” he shouted, grabbing his matchlock and peering through the branches.

  The runner came into view, and Thimmaya recognized him with a pang of alarm. It was one of Pallada Nayak’s cattle hands. “What happened?” he asked tersely, jumping down from the machan.

  “The child … ,” gasped the Poleya, wiping the sweat from his face. “The child is coming.”

  Thimmaya’s face tightened. The baby was not due for many weeks, wasn’t that what Muthavva had said? Why had the pains started so early?

  The men crowded round him as he laced his sandals and tucked his dagger into his cummerbund, slapping his shoulder and telling him not to worry. He barely heard them, all his energy focused on reaching his wife as soon as he could. He loped off along the trail toward the Pallada village, the Poleya struggling to match his pace. “Please, Iguthappa Swami,” he prayed, over and over. “Please.”

  He reached the village just before nightfall and went first to the Pallada house to pay his respects. The evening lanterns were being lit, casting the Nayak in silhouette as he strode up and down the verandah. “Ah, Thimmaya, have you come?” he said, pleased, as Thimmaya bent to touch his feet. “It is good, it is good. Now go to your wife.” Thimmaya nodded, unable to speak. “There is no cause for worry,” the Nayak reassured him. “All is well.”