The House of Blue Mangoes (13 page)

‘You don’t shoot cows in India,’ Franklin, the Superintendent of Police, said quietly. He was a slight, sandy-haired man who had spent a quarter of a century in India and seemed to have absorbed the rhythm of the country; he was slow to argue and had never been known to raise his voice. But it was rumoured that beneath the calm exterior lay a giant temper. Hall was careful around him. He quickly amended his order.

The bullock carts suddenly began to move, and Hall nudged his horse forward. Chevathar was two days of hard riding away and Hall cursed his luck. Why on earth should the natives choose the remotest corner of his district to cause trouble? And why should that fat toad of a governor care if a few hundred natives died? They died all the time anyway! Floods, droughts, famines, plagues, riots constantly decimated them. And death was, when you thought of it, a better alternative to the miserable lives they led.

20

They stopped in a grove of towering tamarind trees to escape the fiercest heat of the day. The servants with the group took out a folding table and chairs for the Englishmen and laid out lunch. Franklin was taciturn by nature and Hall wasn’t up to conversation so it was a quiet meal. After they had finished, the policeman wandered off with a shotgun to see if he could find something for dinner and Hall was left alone with his thoughts. Not a leaf stirred and the heat pressed down on the land. The Collector grimaced to himself. So this was what he had spent thirty years of his life working towards. All the rage, frustration and unhappiness that had fuelled his progress had led to this!

When he had finally received his promotion to Collector of Kilanad, Hall had been overjoyed. He would be lord and master of over one hundred thousand people in a district that was a quarter the size of England. Disillusionment hadn’t taken long to set in. Melur, the district headquarters, was a dump, Kilanad didn’t figure very high in the Government’s priorities and he had little or nothing in common with his English colleagues stationed there. He had stuck it out now for just over a year but it had been torture. The only thing that had prevented him from throwing it all up and crawling back to England was the thought of finally accepting defeat.

At the age of twenty-three, just after he had finished his probationary period for the Indian Civil Service at Oxford, Hall had written a letter to his father, a clergyman in a little parish in Kent where it drizzled eight months of the year. It had been a short letter. In it he had bidden farewell to his family. ‘You will never see me again for I do not intend to return to England, the land of your defeat. I do not intend it to be mine. Farewell, and may you have the joy of our accursed homeland.’

It had been an ugly letter but Hall had believed it was the right thing to do. In the time he had been away he had never once gone back to England on furlough or even on a short visit; he had no desire to visit the country that had in his view humiliated and almost destroyed him.

Nathaniel blamed his birth into the wretchedly poor family of the Reverend Austin Hall as the beginning of his misfortunes. It had been uniformly bad from then on: a miserable childhood, two siblings he had hated, an elementary school he had disliked. He hadn’t made a single friend at school and his teachers didn’t like him. But he had studied with a ferocity and determination that had kept him at the top of his class and won him a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital where he had gratefully assumed the blue gown and yellow stockings. School was where he had first encountered India. But the stories of bravery during the Mutiny and on the Frontier had left only a fleeting impression. Within weeks of arriving at Christ’s Hospital, the English class system had him on the defensive once more. Scholarship boys weren’t considered quite pukka, and if you weren’t any good at cricket or footer, you were immediately the target of the sort of exquisitely refined torture that only schoolboys could devise. Reminded almost daily of his inadequacies, Hall assaulted his books again with a vengeance. He stood near the top of his class throughout school, king of the swots, and at eighteen won a scholarship in Classics to Jesus College, Cambridge. He wished his miserable family could see him now, but of course he would not let them.

Unfortunately, Cambridge didn’t think much of him either. Here the class system was worse than ever. That was when the idea of India hit him with the force of near-divine revelation. The ICS still had an enormous degree of prestige, it was the highest-paid bureaucracy in the world and it could offer him a passage out of England. And the best thing about it would be that he would be able to lord it over the natives, servile creatures who worshipped the white man. Nathaniel did very well in his final term but he was taking no chances. The civil services had been thrown open to deserving candidates from the middle classes some years previously and a host of crammers had sprung up to cater to those who desperately wanted to pass the competitive exam. Hall had some money saved from summer jobs and he travelled up to London to enlist in Wren’s, a crammer with a high rate of success in getting candidates through the written exam. He scored high marks but nearly came a cropper in the viva. To the standard question, ‘Why do you want to join the civil services?’ he almost gave an honest answer: ‘To make money, to leave England, to ride roughshod over the natives,’ but a lifetime of manoeuvring to make the best of his chances came to his rescue. He duly obliged the examiners by telling them what they wanted to hear: that there was much work to be done in India and that he wanted to do his mite in the glorious tradition of the ICS. He was through.

The probationary year at Oxford ensued, during which Nathaniel struggled valiantly to master phonetics, codes and laws, and the history of ancient India, but strangely little on the administrative system in force in India. The unfamiliar subjects did not bother him – he had achieved his objective. When he encountered snide remarks like ‘Cambridge was established by those who were sent down from Oxford’ or ‘The Cambridge man walks as though the world belongs to him, while the Oxford man walks as though he doesn’t give a fig about to whom the world belongs’, he didn’t react. He would leave these pallid fools behind soon enough, and there would be little chance that he would seek them out in India where a thousand men administered a few hundred million people. The only thing he found onerous were the riding lessons he had to take. He disliked the hard bony spine of the horse he rode. And every time the horse was set at a certain five-bar gate it would brake or crash into it, with disastrous consequences for the rider. It was instantly dubbed the ICS Gate but thankfully for Hall it wasn’t a condition of his posting to India that he jump the obstacle. He never became more than an indifferent rider, which was another reason why he hated his job.

The inadequacy of his equestrian skills made the end of every ride a relief and Hall was glad to see the cluster of fly-blown shacks that marked the outskirts of Ranivoor. They had made good time after lunch, though the heat had thoroughly enervated them. Everyone in the party looked forward to a wash, some food, rest. They nudged their horses quickly through the crowded streets. Finally free of the clutter and grime, they cantered past a sprawl of stuccoed brick buildings which contained the offices of the Sub-Collector as well as those of his immediate subordinate, the Sub-divisional Officer. The Sub-jail, white as a tombstone in the dwindling light, stood a few hundred metres from the offices.

Chris Cooke, the Sub-Collector, met them at his bungalow. He had decided to make sure that everything was in order at home for Hall was known to be particular about such things. Cooke lived in a large bungalow that he found much too big for a bachelor, although its spacious sitting room, dining room and four bedrooms came in useful on occasions like this. It was rare for a relatively junior man to have such quarters but Cooke was the only European district officer in the sub-division and was therefore entitled to the bungalow. It was probably his only real perquisite, compared with the life which English district officials enjoyed in other more lively stations. But Cooke wasn’t unhappy. He was deeply interested in the historical and archaeological aspects of his division and was genuinely keen to get to know the Indians he worked with and administered. He tried to do his job fairly and impartially, and unlike many of his countrymen he liked and respected Indians. Visits home on furlough and at Christmas to Madras or Bombay for a week of roistering with his batch-mates and other young Britons gave him all the European company he needed. India’s multifarious attractions, that were so unlike anything to be found anywhere else in the world, mesmerized him. He wanted to imbibe as much of them as he could.

The visit of his Collector was an important event. Even though he was only to stay overnight in Ranivoor, Cooke wondered how he should entertain him. If he knew Hall, the little officers’ club was out of the question for it wasn’t racially segregated. No, he would need to play host to the visitors at home. The pastor of the famous Ranivoor church had begged off as his wife was indisposed, and his subordinate district officer was touring. His Anglo-Indian Inspector of Police, Kidd, was away too, called to a village some twenty kilometres away to investigate a double killing. Which effectively meant he would have to entertain the visitors on his own for he doubted that Hall would enjoy meeting any of the Indians he spent time with.

They dressed for dinner, something Cooke found faintly ludicrous in the searing heat of Ranivoor, but that was the way Collector Hall liked it. And if Cooke wanted his Fortnightly Confidential Reports to pass muster, he would do well not to push his luck on these matters. At seven-thirty precisely, while it was still light outside (the heavy curtains of the dining room were drawn), they sat down to dinner at a fine carved teak table that Cooke had commissioned from the prisoners at the Sub-jail. They perspired gently in dinner jacket and black tie, as the first course was served. Cooke had inherited a cook who made European food brilliantly and the mulligatawny soup was perfect. As the plates were being cleared away, Cooke tried to break the profound morbidity of the evening by telling shikar stories, which always went down well at male gatherings. He began by narrating an incident he’d heard just the previous month about a tiger in the Cuddapah division, which had seized and shaken a villager so violently that the man flew up in the air and broke his front teeth against a branch.

‘Saved his life, though, because he managed to cling on.’

‘Good shooting in Cuddapah,’ Franklin remarked. The taciturn policeman, who was a keen shikari, grew positively loquacious, and they began swapping stories about various shoots they’d been on. After some minutes of this Cooke realized that Hall was growing irritated with the turn the conversation had taken. He tried a little humour, recounting the eccentricities of a sub-divisional magistrate in a neighbouring district who went in such fear of snakes that even during the day he had a peon precede him with a lighted lantern.

‘As if this wasn’t enough, he was careful to put his feet exactly in the footprints of the peon!’ Cooke said with a smile.

‘Reminds me of a story I heard about a Collector who had a problem with rats in his district headquarters,’ Franklin said. ‘He decided to import a large number of cats, until he found they had little interest in the rats but preferred poultry and, of all things, coconuts. Did he learn from the experience? Not a bit of it. The last I heard he was trying to find out where he could obtain suitably large owls that would sort out both the cats and the rats . . .’

Cooke chuckled and was about to launch into a tale about the nocturnal habits of a judge he’d once shared a travellers’ bungalow with when he was dismayed to see Hall’s mouth tighten. They passed some time in silence, until Cooke could bear it no longer. Archaeology had been one of his subjects at Oxford, and it seemed safe.

‘Have you visited Adichallanur in Tinnevelly, sir?’

‘No,’ Hall said shortly.

‘I have and it’s fascinating, all those burial urns with their coins and artefacts and jewellery. It’s curious how people are remembered centuries after they walked the earth. Archaeologists and anthropologists talk of the Grey Stoneware Civilization and the Red and Black Pottery Era and, and . . . it’s funny, isn’t it, that these everyday things we pay scarcely any attention to seem to be the things that survive us.’

Cooke prattled on. ‘Wonder how they’ll remember us a century from now. Perhaps,’ he looked down at the cutlery he held, ‘the Sheffield Steel Culture.’ He laughed, much too loudly, at his own witticism, and when he looked up he was dismayed to see that Hall was eyeing him with distinct disfavour.

Nathaniel Hall had always disliked his young subordinate. He represented everything he had cringed before: Winchester, Oxford, a third-generation ICS man, carelessly brilliant, goodlooking, deeply engaged with India, good at his job, an excellent horseman, popular with his subordinates and in good standing with his superiors. He himself, no matter how hard he tried, could find no fault with Cooke in the time he had been his boss. His confidential reports were precise and well written, he administered his sub-division well, and he was suitably deferential. But that didn’t mean he liked him any better, especially at times like this: Sheffield Steel Culture indeed!

‘Mr Cooke, perhaps you could tell us how you assess the situation in Chevathar?’

‘Yes, of course, sir. As you know, our fear was that the troubles in Chevathar could explode into the sort of nonsense that went on in Travancore in the fifties. You know, where the sudras went around tearing the blouses of women of another sudra sub-caste, saying they were controverting custom. And, of course, Sivakasi!’

‘Yes, yes, we know all that,’ Hall said testily.

Cooke wondered whether his Collector was always such a pleasant dinner companion.

‘To cut to the chase, sir, my own view is that there’s an ancient rivalry between the leading family in the area and one that’s challenging it for supremacy. I believe there’s a matter of disputed land to add to the troubles. All this caste nonsense is merely a smokescreen to mask the real issue. The deputy tahsildar believes it will blow over very quickly, especially as the headman is the sort of man who will not put up with any nonsense. The deputy tahsildar was telling me that it was because of the Dorai family that Chevathar was free of caste violence. I have met the headman, Solomon, on a few occasions and must say I’ve been very impressed by him. Our presence there is intended to be a show of strength, and an investigation into the recent incidents, of course.’