The House of Blue Mangoes (61 page)

Freddie had managed to borrow Michael Fraser’s
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
for two days (it was in great demand), and Kannan and he virtually memorized the great shikari’s wisdom on the various means by which man-eaters should be dispatched. When a fortnight had passed and no further deaths were reported, Kannan suggested to Freddie that they emulate Corbett and track the tiger to its lair.

So it was that Kannan and Freddie found themselves in a strip of eucalyptus jungle around which a couple of the kills had taken place. After mulling over their stock of shikar lore, they had decided that this was the tiger’s home territory.

There was still about an hour and a half of light left in the sky, and the jungle was quiet. Bulbuls flitted over the tea in quick jerky flight. A junglefowl began calling from the opposite hill and another one replied immediately from the dense undergrowth facing them. Koo-koo kooroo kuk kuk kuk. As the calls rang out from hill to hill, Freddie and Kannan looked again at the scrap of paper on which Kannan had scribbled Corbett’s thoughts on calling up the Pipal Pani tiger. It was a short passage:

You, who have spent as many years in the jungle as I have, need no description of a tigress in search of a mate, and to you less fortunate ones I can only say that the call, to acquire which necessitates close observation and the liberal use of throat salve, cannot be described in words . . .

This was the problem. The idea of trying to call up the tiger was sound, but neither of them knew how to do it. However, neither wanted to be the first to admit how ignorant of jungle lore he was, and so they had gone ahead with their plan. Before the appointed day, they had separately attempted to draw out some of the older planters at the club, those who had actually bagged a tiger or bragged that they had, on how to call up the animal. In this they had failed, as none of the planters, even when fuelled with whisky or rum, had either the imagination or the knowledge to emulate a tiger’s vocal range. One old soak had produced an awful croaking noise that had a couple of his neighbours looking at him anxiously. But the planter recovered soon enough and called for another whisky. There was one other possibility that had occurred to Kannan. Perhaps they should seek the advice of Harrison, the planter who’d gone native. If he had been the greatest white shikari the district had known, as everyone said, he might very well have a trick or two up his sleeve. Freddie was quick to shoot the idea down: ‘No one has seen him around for years, we don’t even know if he’s alive. And if he is alive, why hasn’t he made an appearance yet? News about the tiger has filtered to every corner of the district. No, I think we can safely forget about Harrison. Even if he’s around, he’s probably gone blind or insane from syphilis or country liquor or both.’

And so they had come full circle to Corbett. Why had he, always a writer of extreme lucidity and precision, left something as important so tantalizingly undefined? They had debated whether to engage a local shikari to call up the tiger, but even assuming that the natives were willing to get over their superstitious fear of the animal, they had independently come to the conclusion that their lack of experience should not be broadcast to the coolie world, always eager for news of the planters’ inadequacies. Now here they were, without an idea of what to do.

They stood around for a while, feeling foolish.

‘You go first. I’ll stand with my back to that silver oak ready to shoot,’ Freddie offered generously.

‘No, no, my rifle shoots more accurately over a distance, so I should take the shot . . .’

‘Well, all right. You know, I’d have loved to have done the calling but I woke up this morning with a touch of laryngitis . . .’

‘I didn’t know . . .’

‘No, of course not, but I was quite sure that we shouldn’t call off the hunt, because you were an experienced caller as well.’

Kannan glared at his friend. He wished he had got in the bit about laryngitis before the other.

‘There’s no point standing about, let’s get started,’ he said briskly, though he felt none of the confidence he displayed. What if the animal actually appeared out of the scrub jungle? He had no idea how he would handle it and was reassured only by the thought that no self-respecting tiger would come within a hundred miles of him once it had heard what he sounded like. He filled his lungs with air and, cupping his hands around his mouth, he emitted a sound that was a cross between a loud throat-clearing and the barking of an amiable hound.

Freddie looked at his friend in disbelief. ‘I didn’t know tigers called like that,’ he shouted.

‘Well, you do it, if you know so much about it.’

‘No, not at all. I was just being funny.’

‘Don’t be,’ Kannan said shortly. He cupped his hands around his mouth and tried again, straining his vocal cords and attempting to throw his voice. This time his gargling call ended in a burst of coughing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Freddie had put his rifle down and was shaking with laughter.

For a moment he was annoyed, and then the ludicrousness of the situation struck him and he too began to laugh.

‘You sounded just like a constipated bear . . .’ Freddie said, shouting with laughter.

‘Bet you don’t know what a bear sounds like, you idiot,’ Kannan replied.

‘You were so damned effective, old chap, that you’ve even scared away the junglefowl. I was hoping to bag one for supper.’

‘You have a nerve making fun of me. With that whacking great cannon you’re carrying there wouldn’t have been much of the junglefowl left for dinner.’

‘Not much point hanging around here,’ Freddie said, shouldering his rifle. ‘By now that blessed tiger is probably halfway across Travancore.’

When they reached their motorcycles, Freddie said, ‘Let’s forget this nonsense and have a drink. Your house is closer, so you’re it. Hope Helen won’t mind us intrepid shikaris barging in.’

Kannan hesitated. Since Helen had left slightly over six weeks ago he’d managed to maintain the fiction that she was still around because he’d had no visitors with the exception of Murthy. There was no way he could prevent the servants gossiping but it would take a while before news reached the ears of his colleagues. But if Freddie came over . . . He shied away from the thought of having to make explanations.

‘Actually, Freddie, she’s down with a migraine . . . you know . . . and when she’s that way . . . you know . . . I’m not responsible for the consequences!’

‘Christ, the problems you married chaps have. My place then.’

96

Three drinks later, he was telling Freddie about the parlous state of his marriage. He hadn’t meant to share his marital woes with Freddie, especially after Murthy’s diatribe, but the liquor dissolved his inhibitions soon enough. To mask his humiliation he adopted a light bantering air. Once he’d overcome the initial discomfort, Freddie’s attentiveness and a couple more rounds of brandies ensured he spoke freely. After topping up their glasses for the fifth time, they were both quite drunk. They bemoaned the irrational, unstable ways of women. Then, to Kannan’s delight, Freddie began to spout verse:

‘
She plucked one thread

of her glinting hair

and caught my hands

within that snare
.

Laughing, I tried

To shake them free:

the hair, like steel
,

imprisoned me
.

A shackled slave
,

I rue my laughter:

now, where she leads

I stumble after
.’

‘What was that all about?’

‘Paulos. A nobleman at Justinian’s court. About the first century. Christ, I’m sorry, old boy. I’m beginning to sound like my old don at Jesus, but one of my lesser-known claims to fame is that I read Greats before being kicked out of Oxford.’

‘You know, Freddie, I’ve often wondered why you didn’t try to become a writer or a poet.’

‘The planter isn’t expected to be a man of culture, shall we say!’

‘Yes, I know, Major Stevenson asked me whether I read a lot, when he interviewed me. I said no, and he said, good, very good, planters are expected to get their boots dirty, not lounge around reading books.’

‘Not a bad thing at all, if you ask me. One of the reasons I escaped England was to put an end to all those poetry-reading sessions and stuff. The only thing more boring was the old boys’ get-together where a bunch of no-hopers from my old school would gather round to relive the old days, and keep the world at bay.’

‘Yes, school can be stretched only up to a point, unless that’s the only thing of consequence you’ve done in your life. But didn’t you enjoy university?’

‘I had a whale of a time! While it lasted. But once I’d had my fill, I wanted to get the hell out of that as well. Wild horses couldn’t drag me back.’

‘I spent most of my time at college chasing Helen and look how that’s ended . . .’

Freddie laughed and said, ‘There you are. Speaking for myself, I’m glad that time is well behind me . . . Burned my books a long time ago, but the ancient Greeks carved themselves into my mind when I was young and impressionable. How about this one by a rogue called Rufinus:

“
If girls were nice

After lovemaking

No man could fuck them enough

But after bed

All girls

Are nauseating
.”’

Kannan’s face darkened for a moment in embarrassment, then catching sight of Freddie’s face he burst into laughter as well.

‘Bet you made that up. And your language, my God, Freddie, my grandmother would have rubbed green chillies on my lips if I had used a word like that.’

‘Ah, the pleasures of a public-school youth. Buggery, bad poetry and brio.’ He turned serious. ‘You know, I’m very fond of you both. I hope you’re able to work things out.’

‘I hope so too,’ Kannan said as seriously. As with most drunken occasions, the lightness was beginning to alternate with maudlin emotion. ‘I’m hoping to go down to Madras in a couple of months. Perhaps after Easter.’

‘Yup, give things a little time to settle down. She seems a smashing woman, old boy, and I wouldn’t give up on her.’

The tone of the evening lightened again.

‘Women are so different, Freddie. You never know when they’re going to go up in smoke!’

‘You don’t know the half of it. Probably why that Corbett fellow preferred man-eaters. Never married, you know.’ Laughter broke out again, and Kannan thought Murthy might have been right about many things but some Englishmen weren’t half bad.

97

The next victim took all the fun and excitement out of the hunt. The Reverend Benjamin Ayrton was white, and a pillar of the British community in the hills. Everyone agreed that his sermons could have been improved but no one really minded his inadequacy as a pulpit-thumper. Indeed, for two decades, part of the Sunday morning ritual at Pulimed church was attempting to make some sense of what the pastor was talking about. It was common to lay a small bet on how long the old man would manage to stick to his chosen subject of the day before setting off on the first of numerous digressions. The record was forty-five seconds.

The dead man was found by a copse of pines that stood between the church and the parsonage. Pinned to his bloody cassock was a note that read: ‘The White Ruler Is More Deadly Than Tigers! Quit India White Man Or Die!’ The note was signed ‘The Revolutionary Tigers’. His servants hadn’t heard or seen anything.

The tea-planting district was shocked. Not only had the planters to cope with a man-eating tiger, now there were terrorists to contend with! They demanded effective action, something the local Pulimed police station, which usually concerned itself with harmless fights between coolies, was ill-equipped for. A message was telegraphed to the British Resident in Travancore. A deputation set off to Madras to meet the Governor.

Had it been terrorists all along? In their lonely bungalows, the managers and their families quaked at every unusual sound, kept a watchful eye on the servants, and hoped and prayed that the Government would send them a large force of soldiers to cope with the threat they faced. Unfortunately, their request for assistance was denied. There was a war on. And even though most of the top Indian nationalist leaders were in jail, there were enough law-and-order problems in the plains to keep everyone busy. The planters would have to fend for themselves.

Ten days after Reverend Ayrton’s burial, one of the estate supervisors was carried off when he wandered off by himself to smoke a beedi. Not one of the labourers who had been pruning the field heard him cry out. It appeared that the tiger had stalked the man through the defile that bordered the field. With one huge bound it had been upon him, its jaws meeting around his throat. He had died instantly. Stripping off his clothes, the animal had picked up the dead man by the small of the back and had carried him for nearly two miles. The search party found the body at the edge of a thicket of eucalyptus trees. A small portion of the left buttock was eaten, but otherwise the kill was untouched.

Almost unhinged with fear, the people of the plantations, white and brown, barricaded themselves behind locked doors, only venturing out in large noisy groups when the sun was well up. An emergency meeting of all the planters in Pulimed and beyond was called to work out a plan to rid the district of the terror that oppressed them. A day before the meeting, another issue cropped up. The coolies had gone on strike, refusing to go back to work until they were provided with armed protection or, alternatively, until the killer or killers were caught.

98

All afternoon the cars and motorcycles roared and wheezed up the steep slope leading to the Pulimed Club. For the first time since its inception, ladies were allowed into the bar to attend the meeting. The estate wives who, until this afternoon, had had to be content with knocking on the service hatch if they wanted a drink looked around them with great interest. Even Mrs Stevenson, behind the stern face she wore in public, was excited at finally being admitted to this, the holiest of holies, the one place in her kingdom where she had no say. But after the initial excitement, there was an inevitable let-down: was this all there was to the club bar? The tiger had changed one more feature of Pulimed society for ever.