The House of Blue Mangoes (19 page)

Within a very short time, it became apparent to both of them that Muthu had the advantage. He was bigger and stronger than Solomon and still relatively unscathed. Age and peace had dulled Solomon’s fighting edge. Muthu’s blows got through with increasing regularity and the adrenalin rush that had energized him was beginning to wane. A blow to the ribs knocked him sideways, and another that he just managed to avoid grazed his face. His mouth filled with the mineral taste of blood. The blows of Muthu’s staff fell upon him without pause. Then, he remembered a lesson his old instructor had taught him – the one stratagem that was kept for the best student. He began to sink to the ground, waiting for Muthu Vedhar’s concentrated ferocity to waver to give him the opening he needed. As if in answer to a prayer, Muthu’s attack ceased all at once. Astonished, he looked up and saw what had caused Muthu to pause. Father Ashworth stood before them, his face transfigured and calm. The priest spoke firmly. ‘Stop now, Muthu Vedhar, Solomon Dorai. In the name of our Lord I command you to stop this senseless killing.’

Father Ashworth was a small man but the new spirit that welled within him gave his words an unnatural clarity and power. As if a switch had been thrown, all fighting stopped at that instant. A moment only before Muthu, apparently immune to the spell Father Ashworth had cast, muttered, ‘Interfering Christian priest,’ and, snatching up a rusty trident from one of his fallen fighters, thrust it deep into the cleric’s belly.

Father Ashworth was driven backwards by the immensity of the blow. He sat down heavily, his hands clasped prayerfully around the shaft of the weapon, and then slumped to his side. The sand was warm on his face and his rapidly dimming sight took in the vast green eye of the sea, the rumpled sky above, the white teeth of the surf, as he died. Thunder heaved and rumbled on the eastern horizon, lightning whitened the sky and hot hard needles of rain stitched earth and sky into an enormous grey shroud. Already shocked and bemused by the death of the priest, the villagers took the cataclysmic downpour as a sign of divine wrath. A few began to scatter and run, others bowed low to the earth and the rest stood around indecisively.

Summoning up his last reserves of strength, Solomon raised himself on one knee and, arcing his staff, struck the one blow that every master sought to land. The silambu smashed into Muthu’s collar-bone. Before he could react, Solomon swung his staff again, at the giant’s knees. Both kneecaps shattered, his fighting hand swinging uselessly, Muthu Vedhar tottered and began to fall. Solomon was waiting for him, his staff braced and rigid as steel. As his adversary fell forward, the silambu’s blunt end smashed through his chin, bone, gristle and blood ferris-wheeling through the air with the force of the impact. Muthu was dead before he hit the ground. Iron control faltering, Solomon fell by the side of his great enemy. The storm abated, thinned to a light drizzle, then grew into a steady downpour. The monsoon had arrived in Chevathar, a fortnight late.

BOOK II

DORAIPURAM

32

The open flame licked at the tasselled edges of the peacock feather. Slowly indigo, emerald, aquamarine, gold, bronze, the whole shimmering spectrum of colour was reduced to ash. Daniel tipped the ash into a cracked and discoloured china bowl, and picked up another feather. Sleepily he brought it to the flame. Peacocks flew up in his mind, large, heavy birds, their trains swaying like serpents. Fire consumed the feather, singed his finger, and brought him painfully awake. When he had enough ash he mixed it with powdered pepper and jeera. The resulting mixture, peacock feather chooranam, was one of the Pillai Siddha Vaidyasalai’s most popular medicines and was especially recommended for the treatment of hiccups and vomiting.

It was a little past four in the morning and Daniel was the only one at work. The six men who worked with him would be along soon for Dr Pillai’s clinic opened early. Not once had Daniel heard anyone grumble about the long day. The legendary Dr Pillai himself put in even more punishing hours, seeing patients from four in the morning until eight at night, with only a short break for breakfast, and an even shorter one at lunch-time when he drank a glass of fresh buttermilk. When Daniel and the other assistants finished, the old doctor would still be at work, experimenting with some new formulation to add to the range of patent medicines the vaidyasalai sold, or deep in a book. By the time they returned the next morning he would be bathed and dressed in the room in which he received his patients.

Daniel was poking around in a cupboard for more peacock feathers when there was a tap on his shoulder. Chandran, Dr Pillai’s long-serving assistant, said that the doctor wanted to see him. This was so unusual that Daniel felt nervous. What was the matter? Had he done something terrible? Was he about to lose his job? He liked it here. The four years that he had been at the vaidyasalai had calmed him down, given him the security that he had needed desperately. Without it, he doubted that he would ever have been able to reconcile himself to the harrowing events at Chevathar. He remembered how he would toss and turn, his father’s last words filling his mind, the last desperate flight . . . The news of his father’s death, and of Father Ashworth’s, had almost destroyed him. His recovery had been gradual but the very precision of making up medicines, the concentration it demanded, had been an anodyne, and he had begun to heal.

What did Dr Pillai want with him, he thought frantically. The doctor’s temper was explosive but he was sure that he had done nothing to upset him. Could he have made a mistake in preparing one of the numerous formulations he made every day? No, that couldn’t be possible; on the rare occasions that he had come to Dr Pillai’s notice he had been commended for his rapidly growing skills as a pharmacist. He thought about the medicines he had put together recently. He had made a large batch of karumaikilangu legiyam yesterday but that was a harmless malt preparation, nothing could have gone wrong with that; then there had been some kungiliya parpam . . . Could he have used too much elaneer? No, no, that was impossible; he had been making it for so many years . . . perhaps he had grown careless. Realizing that Chandran was waiting for him, he grew even more panicked.

‘Did Doctor-aiyah say why he wanted to see me?’ He hadn’t meant to sound so rude – this was getting worse.

‘No.’ Chandran was as taciturn as his master. Forcing himself to relax, Daniel followed Chandran to Dr Pillai’s consulting room.

The doctor was a short dark man with a circle of white hair, from which his head rose oval and bald like a tinctured egg. A great hooked nose gave him a stern aspect although his eyes often seemed distracted. Dr Pillai had acquired an enormous reputation in the forty years that he had practised in Nagercoil. A man of some means, he had decided early in his career to devote his time and expertise to the treatment of the poorest of the poor, and had opened a small clinic on the outskirts of town. When his father died he had inherited a large house on Mandapam Street, and moved his rooms there. He had acquired assistants and compounders but there was still no charge for his services. If you could afford to, you made a donation. Otherwise you paid only for the medicine, much of which was made on the premises and sold at cost.

Quite apart from the fact that his services were free, Dr Pillai’s popularity sprang from the fact that he was an exceptionally good doctor. Although he had spent a lifetime mastering the intricacies of siddha medicine he was quick to discard its unnecessary and outmoded aspects. Being a pragmatic man, he borrowed whatever he needed from other medical disciplines. For this, the purists castigated him and said he didn’t deserve to call himself a siddha vaidyan. Dr Pillai was unfazed, for he cared neither for honorifics nor acceptance by the traditional vaidyans. He was obsessed with siddha but he was even more passionate about curing people, and he needed medicine that worked. As hundreds of patients were healed by his somewhat unorthodox methods, his fame and workload grew. Charity’s father and Dr Pillai had played chess every Thursday evening for twenty years, so when Jacob Packiam asked whether his grandson could join the clinic, Dr Pillai had had no objection.

Having announced Daniel, Chandran left to take up his usual station by the door. The doctor’s room opened into a large hall. Patients waited here on mats that lined the wall. As Dr Pillai finished with a patient he would mutter a prescription that Chandran would relay to another assistant, who would take it across to the room where Daniel and his colleagues worked to make up dozens of prescriptions every day.

For a while Dr Pillai took no notice of him, and Daniel’s anxiety increased. He tried to calm himself down by looking around the room. The doctor sat cross-legged on a mat, taking the pulse of a woman so bent and polished by age, she seemed to be a branch growing from the wood of the low stool she occupied. An enamel bowl on a stand and a wooden cupboard constituted the rest of the furniture in the room. The unornamented walls were cracked and peeling. Dr Pillai, who had never married, cared nothing for such fripperies as freshly whitewashed walls and curtained windows. But the consulting room was spotlessly clean. Dr Pillai finished examining the old woman, then beckoned Daniel over. He asked him to hold out his hands. He grasped Daniel’s right hand in his own, looked at it for a long moment, then said abruptly, ‘How long have you been working here?’

‘Four years, aiyah.’

‘Good. Take this paati’s pulse and tell me what you feel. Here, like this.’ He showed Daniel how to place the index, ring and middle fingers on the radial artery of the patient’s emaciated wrist, then sat back and waited. Daniel was terrified. He had no idea why Dr Pillai was asking him to do this. He had never diagnosed a patient’s ailment before and he knew nothing about the taking of a pulse. All he could do was make up siddha formulations that had been taught to him by Chandran and the other assistants. He felt the old woman’s pulse all right, a thin surge beneath the skin and flesh, but he had no idea what the doctor expected him to say. The silence increased his nervousness. Dr Pillai said, ‘Tell me what the pulse sounds like. You’re an observant young man . . . Does it sound like the wind through the leaves, the flapping of a crow’s wings . . .’

A flash in his mind. An earnest youth displaying a prized possession to a friend. ‘Aiyah, it sounds like a tortoise walking . . .’ The minute the words were out he felt foolish, he wanted to fling the patient’s hand down, run from the room. To his astonishment, Dr Pillai’s stern countenance relaxed, almost into a smile. Gently detaching the patient’s hand from Daniel’s grip, he said simply, ‘As I thought, you have the gift. From today you start assisting me with patients.’

Daniel raced home that night and went straight to his grandfather’s room. Jacob Packiam was seated at his table reading the Bible. Forgetting his usual diffidence in the presence of his grandfather, Daniel blurted out, ‘Thatha, did you ask Doctor-aiyah to give me more responsibilities?’

Jacob deliberately took off his spectacles, placed a bookmark in his Bible and only then permitted himself a smile. ‘Daniel, nobody can tell Pillai to do anything. But some weeks ago he did say he was reaching a stage in his life when he wanted someone to take some of the load off him. He thought you might be the one . . . Now go on, tell your amma, she’ll be very happy.’

‘Thank you, thatha.’ He walked off in a daze.

In the months that followed, Dr Pillai began to open up the mysteries of siddha medicine to his young pupil. He taught him that man was but a microcosm of the universe built from the same five elements, the panchamahabhutas, that constituted it: earth, water, fire, wind and ether. The bhutas combined to form, in each cell of the body, three kuttrams – vatham, pitham and kapham. When these were balanced harmoniously, people enjoyed good health. When they grew disproportionate, they fell ill. Siddha medicine, Dr Pillai explained, always tried to restore the balance.

As their relationship strengthened, Dr Pillai initiated Daniel into the lore contained in the ancient volumes on siddha medicine in his possession. He explained the similarities between siddha, the medicine of the Tamils, and ayurveda, the other traditional method of healing that had originated in the north, and he educated Daniel about the eighteen celebrated siddhars to whom all knowledge about siddha was attributed. He would talk to his pupil late into the night about the religious and mystical traditions of the science: how Lord Shiva had imparted the principles of siddha to his consort Parvati, who had passed it on to Nandideva, who in turn had revealed it to the greatest sage of the Tamil country, Agasthiar.

The months passed. Daniel spent most of his time at the vaidyasalai, arriving early and returning home late. He was exhilarated by what he was learning and experiencing. In Dr Pillai’s view, the finest physicians were those who could make the best diagnoses and he patiently guided Daniel through the eight diagnostic methods in siddha medicine: the reading of the pulse, the examination of the eyes and the tongue, the interpretation of voice, touch and colour, the analysis of urine and faeces. Daniel watched, listened and learned.

By the time his first year as Dr Pillai’s apprentice came to an end, he was beginning to come to grips with the fundamentals of siddha. It would be a while yet before Dr Pillai would allow him to examine patients on his own but Daniel grew more confident by the day. He learned to use his fingers on a patient’s pulse like a musician playing a stringed instrument and he could tell the disease in a patient through the divination of the pattern made by a drop of urine in a bowl of oil. If the drop spread in the shape of an arrow, a bull, a spear or an elephant, the kuttrams were not balanced. If it arranged itself like an umbrella, flower, ring or wheel, all was well. He could diagnose a disease through touch and interpret a patient’s tongue. The intimate secrets of the body yielded to him while his mentor looked on approvingly.

As he was leaving the clinic one evening Dr Pillai called him in and announced, without preamble, that he was sending Daniel to the Government Medical College in Melur to earn a diploma in Western medicine. ‘In my experience, knowledge of siddha medicine alone will not make you a good physician, although you could spend several lifetimes studying it. It’s important to be able to contrast it with other systems. It will teach you to appreciate the greatness of siddha. An LMP diploma will come in useful. You leave in a month.’ Daniel could hardly believe his ears. He remembered Father Ashworth’s futile attempts to get his father to allow him to study medicine. How proud the old priest would be if he could see him now, he thought.