hoarsely, still smiling.
“Coming your way.”
The man picked up another gourd, and held it out to Costas. Pradesh stopped the man’s hand, and sniffed it. “It’s kallu, palm toddy, fermented in the sun. Sometimes they add poppy leaves to it, sometimes marijuana. But not today. It has to be pure, for the festival.” He let the man pass it on. Costas took a cautious sip and then a mouthful, swilling it around and then swallowing it. He exhaled and looked appreciatively at the gourd. “Not bad. A little like cider.”
“I was checking it wasn’t arrack,” Pradesh said. “That’s what you get when you distill this stuff A lethal mix of methyl and amyl alcohols. That’s another way the lowlanders exploit these people. There are arrack stills in every village now. Palm toddy kept them floating along, but arrack destroys them.” Costas made as if to hand the gourd back, but the toddy-tapper pushed it away, insistent. The man then took Pradesh by the hand and led him to a group of Koya who had edged into the clearing and were sitting in the shade of a spreading tamarind tree. Pradesh glanced back. “I’ll question them about the Maoists,” he said. “I need to find out where they’re operating.” He squatted down beside the group, and Jack and Costas watched intently. At first his questions were met with silence, and then the toddy-tapper became animated, talking hurriedly, putting his fingers by his eyes, pulling them, making a face, then jabbering again, gesticulating at his wrists, his forearms, as if he were drawing on them. He took something out of a little bag on his loincloth and passed it to Pradesh. The other Koya slunk back into the edge of the jungle, looking fearful, squatting on their haunches with their bows and spears. Pradesh asked several more questions, then put his hand on the man’s shoulder and stood up, turning back to Jack and Costas with a look of concern on his face. “I have to go with him somewhere private. He won’t talk here. You go to the beach. I’ll meet you there.”
Fifteen minutes later Jack and Costas were back beside the boat, sitting in the shade of the pontoon. The sun had been burning fiercely, but was now low in the western sky over the river gorge. They had about three hours of daylight left. Jack was tapping his fingers on the side of the pontoon, but then stopped himself For once someone else was in control, and Jack was unaccustomed to it. But Pradesh seemed to have everything reined tight, and he knew better than Jack how long it would take to get to the jungle shrine and back out again. Jack relaxed slightly, and slid down the side of the pontoon, his elbows on the sand. He watched Costas in amused silence. Costas was sitting on the sand with his knees slightly bent, and the legs of his shorts flapping open. In the distance a river crab had spied a cozy nook, and was hurtling sideways toward him. At the last moment Costas arched upward and the crab shot under him and past the boat, disappearing off down the beach behind them at prodigious speed. Costas saw Jack watching him, and waved the gourd with an innocent look on his face. “What?” “I think you might have had enough of that.” “I’ve only had two slurps. Anyway, I’m on holiday. On the beach. At last.” He took another slurp and wiped his mouth, gasping. “Okay. Enough to take the edge off the disappointment, no more.” He turned the gourd upside down on the sand, then took a long drink from his water bottle. “While we wait, Jack, fill me in. This guy Bebbie. What was he doing here? What was the rebellion all about?”
Jack leaned back and put his arms behind his head. He looked at the palms fringing the beach, and watched another toddy-tapper shimmy expertly down a trunk. He reached over and tapped the upturned gourd. “A tax on toddy. Totally unnecessary, hardly a significant revenue stream, but a massive source of contention for the tribal people. That’s how so many colonial conflicts began. A simmering resentment, and then a small administrative blunder that takes catastrophic center stage. And in 1879, with war again in Afghanistan, an internal rebellion was the last thing the government wanted. The reaction was typical. Years of indifference and neglect of the jungle people were followed by heavy-handedness and inefficiency in putting down the rebellion. From the outset the British were hampered by poor knowledge of the people and the jungle conditions. That’s where Bebbie comes in. There were many remarkable British officials in the Indian Civil Service, of high intellect and moral rectitude. Bebbie was a lower tier official, assigned to a backwater. For the tribals, there were some outsiders they worshipped, like their memory of the fabled prince Rama himself Bebbie was assuredly not one of those.”
A noise made them turn toward the jungle. It was a new sound, like chimes or distant gongs. It was hard to tell if it was the breeze through the trees, or real. Then it began in earnest, a drumbeat from the direction of the village, three deep beats, a silence, three more beats, intensifying as more drums joined in. Then they saw them, men in loincloths carrying long, double-ended drums, coming out of the jungle on either side of the path, then stepping back, then coming out again with each set of beats. Women appeared between them, wearing bells in their ears, shaking their heads vigorously. They stamped the earth in unison, gathering force with the drumbeat, swelling in numbers, going in and out in line between the drummers. Voices began rising and falling in a plaintive chant. Then the line parted and a man appeared wearing a bison skull on his head, wrapped around with a red sari and mounted with peacock feathers, the horns arching high and dripping red. More men with horns followed, forming a circle on the sand, stamping in and out in unison and chanting.
“Horns of the gaur,” Jack murmured. “The other dreaded beast of the jungle. Looks like they’ve bloodied them already.”
“Just with chickens, I hope,” Costas said. “But it’s still pretty damn terrifying. Add human sacrifice, and put yourself in the mind of a British soldier watching this from that river steamer in 1879. This would have looked like the vision of hell that all those Victorian pastors would have drummed into them as kids. These were heathen savages, and those horned men are a vision of the devil himself.”
Pradesh came down the path through the line of drummers and strode toward them. The toddy-tapper had been with him, but stayed behind at the edge of the jungle. Pradesh glanced at his watch, then peered up at the sky, scanning the eastern horizon. “The bison dance,” he said. “The first act of the festival. The toddy’s flowing freely now. It’s a good time for us to leave.”
“Before they strip me and send me on a little hike in the jungle, you mean,” Costas said.
“Any luck?” Jack asked.
“You saw what the toddy-tapper did with his hands, in the jungle clearing? He pulled the skin of his face to make his eyes slant. He said a man came here before the monsoon broke, about four months ago. He had eyes like that.”
“Katya’s uncle?” Costas said.
“Could be,” Jack murmured. “Hai Chen was Mongolian Chinese. Anything else?”
“The man told the Koya he was a friend of Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf He was an anthropologist who came here with his wife in the 1930s, during the final years of British rule. They stayed in the jungle for several months, and championed the tribals’ cause. Christoph befriended my father as a boy, and was always spoken of by the Koya with great reverence.”
“The tribals remember a visitor from almost eighty years ago?” Costas asked.
“Absolutely,” Pradesh replied. “And they remember Lieutenant Howard, Jack’s great-great-grandfather. In the months after the rebels had been defeated and the main Rampa Field Force had been withdrawn, Howard and his sappers remained behind to clean up and begin road building. Apparently, Howard went out of his way to help the villagers, improving water supply and sanitation, showing them tricks of construction. He was unlike the missionaries who occasionally came up the river. He told them the only gods they should worship were their own. They remembered that. He became ill with exhaustion, and they looked after him here, in this village. He was especially solicitous of the children, and made them toys while he was convalescing. And they remember the day the steamer came to take him away, the day he was told that his own son had died. He was inconsolable, and came out to this riverbank by himself, to the place where the rebels had cajoled the Koya into carrying out the sacrificial ceremony that day in 1879. It was where they sacrificed the child. Perhaps the sight of that had most affected Howard.
Jack swallowed hard. “That sounds like him,” he murmured. “He was devoted to his own children, the ones he had in the following years.”
“But he never returned the sacred velpu or the tiger gauntlet,” Costas said.
“For some reason he and Wauchope decided to keep them,” Jack replied. “Howard may have intended to go back to the jungle shrine and try to find a way back in, but after he was struck down by illness he never returned to the jungle.”
Pradesh turned to Costas. “You asked about how the Koya remember. Because they have no timeline, visitors of a hundred or a thousand years ago are described in the same terms, as ‘in the time of their forefathers.’ Eventually, those most distant take on the mantle of mythology, and some of them become gods.”
“By claiming friendship with von Furer-Haimendorf Hai Chen was deploying the oldest technique in the
