Author Description

The story unfolds in the mountainous Wayanad in peninsular India. George Abraham, a young biologist on a habitat study in a cardamom plantation, finds the microcosm of Wayanad right in the estate: the old estate bungalow where he stays, the estate's cluster of staff quarters, the little bazaar in the hamlet, the green cardamom hills, the wildlife that strays into the garden, and simple agrarian life that binds all these. As he buddies up the estate's owner, whom everybody calls 'planter', estate's staff and a local teacher, he learns that everything is not well with the plantation. The estate has a regular visitor: misfortune manifested variously, sometimes in mysterious deaths and sometimes in unexpected fiascos. Soon he discovers a hushed-up fear that stays deep-rooted in every mind: a curse looming over the estate and its far-fetched association to a legend in the local culture. 'I was thinking about my father. You know, he raised this cardamom garden and tended it for about twenty years and till his last day when he died in a mysterious jeep accident, right here on the estate road, ' planter Gregory pauses and scans the moonlit hills as though scouring for his father, 'I took over from him. It is fifteen years after that. Now I am greying. What do I see looking back to these thirty-five years? Something bad lingers in here, refusing to depart.' 'What might be that?' George asks, his eyes on the stars in the sky mellowed by the moon. 'It looks, ' the planter grasps a window bar and looks searchingly at the bushes where nightjars have gone vociferous. Turning from the window, he whispers, his eyes exuding a hidden fear, 'like a curse.' A stirring event or disaster purported to be historical may create a legend in folk culture. In rich symbolism, the legend narrates the meaning of that event to its culture. Told and retold through generations, it sometimes outgrows the original event and becomes meaning itself, foreshadowing a rep