Free Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna Page B

the maroon-lacquered floors of the mission. Sometime during the night, the skies had finally called a truce and the assault of the rains had abated. Mercara had awoken that morning to the forgotten sound of birdsong. Watery shafts of light spilled from behind dark gray clouds, laminating the town in opalescence. As the morning wore on, the sun had gained in confidence, scattering the clouds and blazing forth in all its splendor. Light danced from every surface, from within the raindrops suspended on a leaf, glancing off glass windows and diffusing from the hills in a shimmering haze.
    Gundert stood on the verandah of his apartments, looking out at the dripping garden. He waved at passersby who called cheerfully to him, reveling in the everyday sounds so long suffocated by the rain. The potter calling out his wares, the trrring ing of bicycle bells, the whooping of children, the excited barking of dogs as they shook themselves in the sun. He looked up at the skies and smiled. “Devanna,” he called. “Come here a moment.
    â€œDevanna,” he called again, a little louder this time. Frowning slightly, he went back indoors.
    Devanna sat by the window of the dining room, engrossed in his painting. The colors had to be just right, the mauve tingedwith purple. Cedrela toona. How beautiful the names sounded in Latin, how much more majestic the trees seemed to become when they were called thus, standing straighter and taller, puffing out their chests with pride. Why, even the ordinary athi tree that Pallada Nayak cursed and spat at because of the way it extended its jumble of roots under the paddy fields, even that annoying tree carried poetry in its sap. Fi-cus race-mosa .
    When the Reverend had introduced him to botany, he had opened up a whole new world. Devanna liked to recite the names of the books in his head:
    Flora Sylvatica, Flora Indica, Spicilegium Neilgherrense, Icones Plantarum, Hortus Bengalensis, Hortus Calcuttensis, Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indicae
    The Reverend had shown him colored plates and lithographs, the minute differences in serration that could mark a plant as an entirely new species. A keen amateur botanist when he had first arrived in Mercara, Gundert had let it be known that he was looking for exotic plants and that he would pay a fair sum for anything that caught his fancy. At first, people had knocked on the mission doors at all hours with plants they were sure would excite him: fiercely colored orchids, sweet-smelling sampigé, and slender shoots of wild jasmine. Gundert politely had these planted in the mission garden, explaining that such plants were already well documented in the scientific world; what he wanted was something new, some of the indigenous medicinal plants, perhaps?
    They had brought him holy tulasi, so beloved by the ancestors and the Gods, and the delicately fronded narvisha that was planted in the courtyard of every home. The leaves of the narvisha had a pungent odor that was anathema to snakes, poisonous even to the mighty tiger, it was said. These, too, Gundert had regretfully declined as mundane. They had then brought him that most powerful of plants, madh toppu, or medicine green, which, when cooked along with jaggery and coconut milk at the onset of the monsoons, stained their piss bright red and was known to preventno fewer than forty-seven maladies. Gundert sighed. Justicia wynaadensis , he said, that was its name, and there were two specimens already growing in the Botanical Gardens in Bangalore. That was when most of the townspeople had thrown up their hands, shaking their heads over the obduracy of the Reverend. It was impossible to please him, they cried, it was hopeless. Gundert had finally resorted to field trips of his own, and in Devanna he found a gifted apprentice.
    He taught Devanna the importance of discipline, the orderly mapping of an area, the close examination and recording of the tiniest detail. They combed through the hills in and around