David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

Pradesh looked at the riverbank. “I told you I was brought up near the Godavari River, in Dowlaiswaram. Well, my grandfather was actually a Koya, from this place. The story of that day in 1879 became a kind of legend, kept secret, even from the anthropologists who occasionally came up here asking questions. As far as I know, what I’m about to tell you has never been told to any other outsiders.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“The rebels put on a spectacular show. They executed their police captives on that beach, in full view of the sappers on the river steamer trapped on the sandbank. But they also stirred the rest of the Koya into a frenzy, feeding them alcohol and god knows what else. The tribals carried out three sacrifices that day, the full meriah. A man, a woman and a child.”

“A child too?” Jack murmured.

“Later, the authorities in the lowlands refused to believe it was a sacrifice, and thought the rebels had given their executions the guise of meriah to make them seem more terrifying, as if they were reviving a dread practice the British thought they’d stamped out years before. But the authorities were wrong. That scene on the riverbank was the real thing. Even today, sacrifices are still performed using langur monkeys and chickens, but the meriah ritual is still here, lurking just under the surface, and it would take little provocation, the re-lighting of that tinderbox, for it to be revived.”

“But what happened?” Jack persisted. “What made my great-great-grandfather end his diary that day?”

Pradesh pursed his lips. “I don’t know. Something traumatized him. It would have been a dreadful sight, the child especially, the flesh ripped from them while they were still alive. Maybe he felt impotent, unable to help. You say he was the father of a young child himself? You told me he was in India as a boy during the mutiny, when there were terrible scenes of slaughter. Maybe some latent memory of that horror resurfaced as he watched the sacrifice. By all accounts he was an excellent officer, a tough soldier, so whatever he saw or did, it must have been pretty bad.”

“So where do we go from here?” Jack asked quietly.

Pradesh paused. “I know where he and Lieutenant Wauchope went that day.”

“Go on.”

Pradesh reached into the front of his shirt and took out a pendant hanging on an old leather necklace. “It’s a tiger’s claw,” he said. “The tiger was killed by my grandfather, who was a muttadar. That’s a village chief, but also a kind of priest. The tiger was attacking a boy playing by the river, and my grandfather shot it with an old East India Company musket the Koya had stolen years before from the native police. But the tiger is sacred here, and by killing it my grandfather became an outcast, forced to leave the jungle. He met my grandmother, a lowlander, and they lived in Dowlaishweram. But their son, my father, became the district forest officer, and he used to bring me up here. I was adopted by the villagers of Rampa and learned to speak the Koya dialect. The tribal people revered my father because the officials posted up here are usually lowlanders, and traditionally the lowlanders were seen as corrupt moneylenders who treated the hill people with contempt. My father actually went to Delhi to fight their case for forest rights. He was a great man.”

“He must be proud of you.”

Pradesh looked downcast. “He might have been. I’ll never know. Ever since the time of the British Raj, the cause of the forest people has been hijacked by others. A hundred years ago it was the Indian nationalist movement, who claimed that the tribal uprisings were somehow part of an independence struggle against the British. And now it’s the Maoists, the so-called People’s War Group. The tribals are angry again because the government has been selling mining concessions, and the PWG have taken the tribals’ side. In reality the PWG couldn’t care less. It was just a way to get the tribals to leave them alone in their jungle bases where they plan terrorist attacks around India. My father confronted them and was murdered for it.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said.

“It’s why I’ve never been posted up here,” Pradesh replied ruefully. My colonel knows my family history. I was too close.”

“You don’t look the vengeance type,” Costas murmured.

“Try me,” Pradesh said quietly.

Costas pointed at the claw hanging from Pradesh’s neck. “Isn’t that going to get us into trouble with any Koya we come across? I mean, if the tiger’s sacred?”

Pradesh shook his head. “Once a tiger’s dead and the spirit has left, the skin and claws have great value. The skin is worn by a muttadar for dancing and ceremonies, and the claws are distributed among the young men of the village. They’re good-luck charms, to ward off the angry spirits when the men are hunting deep in the jungle.”

Costas downed his tea in one gulp. “I think I’d opt for an assault rifle.”

Pradesh grinned. “That would help too.”

“Let’s have your story,” Jack said. “What the Koya remember about that day.”

Pradesh paused. “It was told to me by my grand father when I was a boy. For the hill people here it has become part of their lore, shrouded in legend like the foundation myths of the gods. But it concerns your great-great-grandfather.”

“Go on.”

“The most sacred objects of the Koya were velpus, a word meaning idols or gods,” Pradesh said. “Each family had one, each clan. They were usually small objects that would seem commonplace to us but were exotic to the Koya, like a piece of wrought iron. Each velpu was kept inside a length of hollow bamboo about a foot long. They were guarded with great secrecy, only brought out on rare occasions to be worshipped. The greatest of them all, the supreme velpu, was called the Lakka Ramu. It was kept in a cave shrine deep in the jungle, and was never opened. It was said that the god inside was too dazzling, and would blind anyone who gazed on it. Perhaps it was glass, maybe a gem-stone, something exotic that had reached the Koya from the outside world countless generations ago. The supreme velpu held the soul of the Koya people. Without it, they would be living in a shadowland, at the whim of the malign spirits who haunted the jungle, especially the dreaded konda devata, the spirit of the tiger. And they have been in that shadowland since 1879.”

“What happened?” Costas asked.

Pradesh glanced around and lowered his voice. “My grandfather, the village chief, was a hereditary muttadar. By ancient tradition the chiefs of Rampa village had been guardians of the jungle shrine where the sacred Lakka Ramu was hidden. My grandfather’s grandfather was the muttadar in 1879, but he didn’t survive the rebellion. I know what happened to him from the rebels who watched the events of that day unfold from the jungle, men of my own clan who slunk back to their villages after the revolt was over and passed the story down to their children. You showed me Howard’s diary, Jack, the final entry. On that day the muttadar was surrounded by the rebels and shot full of arrows. They knew what he’d done.”

“Which was?” Costas said.

“The muttadar feared that Chendrayya, the rebel leader, would come to the shrine and take the Lakka Ramu, and use it to control all the hill people for his own purposes. Chendrayya came from another clan, one that had been locked in a feud for generations with the muttadar’s clan, an ancient dispute over which family should control the shrine. The British officers knew all about tribal feuds from their experiences on the north-west frontier of India, and they used it to their advantage.”

“The muttadar came over to the British,” Jack murmured.

“He took the velpu from the shrine for safekeeping, then he took a huge chance and volunteered himself as a guide and interpreter,” Pradesh said. “His condition was that the British officers allow him to return the velpu to the shrine when it was all over. He was on the river steamer with the sappers on that final day in Howard’s diary, 20 August 1879. It’s in the pages you emailed me, Jack. It fits with what I knew exactly. There was a big firefight that day with the rebels in the jungle, dozens killed and wounded. Then Howard and the others on the steamer must have witnessed that sacrificial scene by the river. The muttadar saw it too, and got jittery, went to pieces. It would have seemed as if all the malign spirits of the jungle were converging on him, taunting him for taking the velpu. There’s no record in Howard’s diary of what happened next, and nothing more in the regimental records at Bangalore. Most of the officers who returned from Rampa just wanted to forget about it. But there’s a story told to me by my grandfather. A British official with the sappers, a man called Bebbie, had been taken ill, and was still in the jungle. Howard and Wauchope set off with a rescue party. Bebbie was laid up near the shrine, already dead. The muttadar had volunteered to lead them to the spot, providing he could take the idol with him. The British officers probably felt they had no choice. Even with their superior weapons it would have been suicidal to venture into the jungle, a small force of a dozen against hundreds of rebels. They gambled that the presence of the idol would keep the rebels from attacking them. The muttadar backed off from the shrine at the last minute, terrified that the god would wreak vengeance on him, and then he was murdered. Howard himself took the idol into the cave.”