The House of Blue Mangoes (30 page)

On cue, a nondescript young man who had been strolling around on the fringes of the crowd gave a huge roar and headed for the statue of the saint at a dead run. With a loud wail, he leapt into the air and crashed head first into the iron bars with a sickening thump. His fettered hands clinked against the saint’s cage. He rushed at the saint again. A long, ecstatic sigh escaped the crowd – this was what they had been waiting for. Behind Daniel, a man was talking to his neighbour. ‘Did you see that? If you or I had hit our head against those bars they would have cracked open like coconuts. It’s the devil inside him that keeps him from injury. The devils can’t stand the saint, that’s why they try to attack him.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Yes, yes, it’s quite a spectacle. I’ve been coming here for nearly seven years, at least once a month. It’s better than any therukoothu or villupaatu.’

And so it was. The roaring man was now joined by two beautiful young girls dressed in their best saris, their faces expressionless masks. They cavorted around the hall, bouncing up and down as if on steel springs, moaning deep in their throats. Then, taking long run-ups like well-jumpers, they soared into the air in unison, turning perfect cartwheels before landing on the ground with a thud.

‘Did you see their saris? Even when they were upside down, they didn’t fall down around their waists. It’s the devils which keep them glued to their bodies,’ the knowledgeable villager said. And indeed it did seem incredible that no matter how frenziedly the girls threw themselves about, their carefully plaited hair and their clothes remained unruffled.

Daniel was sickened by the carnival atmosphere. He hadn’t brought Charity here to be made a spectacle of. She had remained quiet throughout the evening, only glancing up occasionally if there was an especially boisterous man or woman on the lighted stage. Not wanting to risk exposing her to the statue, Daniel took her the long way round to the room in the church where the priest was receiving supplicants. When their turn came, Daniel explained the situation, while Charity sat impassively. The padre tried talking to Charity, but she would not reply. Giving up quickly, as the crowd pressed up against them, he said a short prayer, sprinkled water on her, made the sign of the cross and gave Daniel a slip of paper on which was written a verse from the Bible and a cheap copper pendant bearing a vague likeness of the saint. The exorcism was over. ‘Bow before the saint. The devils in her will be challenged.’

‘Will she be cured?’

‘Depends on her faith in the Lord. She could be cured right away or it could take a while.’

Daniel was going to ask more questions but the priest had already turned to the next visitor. Nervously he shepherded Charity into the queue of devotees filing past the shrine. As they approached the statue, Daniel’s anxiety increased, but he needn’t have worried. The demons within his mother weren’t perturbed by the presence of the saint. Charity walked silently past the statue.

They returned home the next day. Daniel reverted to siddha ways of treatment. As the months went by and Charity didn’t get any worse, he began to worry less. Then her sorrow manifested itself again, in a quite unexpected way.

46

The beggars of Nagercoil were an organized lot. Although there were dozens of them, they had worked out a very professional system by which all the members of their fraternity would benefit. Territories for each beggar or group were clearly mapped out, so they didn’t compete unfairly with anyone else. Some would stake out temples and places of pilgrimage, others would haunt cremation grounds and cemeteries, and the majority would criss-cross town, arriving at certain streets on predetermined days, taking care to keep the frequency of their visits low so that the good housewives of Nagercoil didn’t tire of them.

Very early one morning, the old wall-eyed woman who had been taken on to help around the house when Charity had fallen ill came rushing in to Lily’s room screaming, ‘The kitchen is on fire, the house is on fire.’

Lily hastily accompanied the servant to the kitchen, where she found the earthen stove wreathed in flames. It had been stuffed so full of firewood and coconut husks that a portion of the kitchen did seem to be on fire. A large container that was full of something that smelled like stew sat on the burning fuel. Charity calmly watched the fire. It was three in the morning.

Lily went up to her mother-in-law and anxiously asked her if everything was all right. Charity muttered something. Later, Lily would tell her husband that it sounded like ‘hunger must be fed’, but she wasn’t sure. For now, she helped Charity make the chicken stew. There was enough in the container to feed at least two dozen people, but Charity had no answer for why she had cooked so much. From that day onwards, the hearth in the little kitchen would devour massive amounts of fuel from morning to night as Charity and the crone cooked and cooked, churning out an astonishing variety of food – appams thin, soft and papery, towers of puttu liberally laced with grated coconut, athirasam crumbling like moist, fragrant earth, hillocks of idiyappam light and diaphanous as spiders’ webs, basins of stew and sweetened coconut milk, neimeen kolambu, shrimp curry and vast mountains of biryani that perfumed the house and the neighbourhood.

Unsurprisingly, the family could eat barely a fraction of these monumental feasts, so the beggars benefited. The regulars paid a visit every Saturday, rattling tin or coconut-shell receptacles against the bars of the gate to alert the household to their arrival. As soon as Charity’s cooking binge began, word spread that there was food to spare. Within days, the cottage became a daily stop at lunch-time for scores of beggars who waited impatiently for their share of heaped portions of biryani spiked with succulent chunks of mutton or chicken (for some reason Charity never cooked a fish biryani), or platters of dosai or slabs of halwa glistening like polished granite, or tamarind rice, or whatever it was that Charity had decided to make that day.

Sometimes the food would taste strange: onion-flavoured halwa, for example, or sweet biryani, as Charity carried experimentation too far. But, by and large, the beggars ate well. Some wouldn’t even do their daily rounds, preferring to camp near the cottage so as to have to make the minimum effort.

It was an expensive business, but Daniel decided that so long as it was therapeutic he would finance his mother’s passion. Gradually, Charity’s labours grew less frenzied, to the great disappointment of the beggars. A couple of months later, the clattering of their vessels at the gate drew no reaction from her. It appeared that the vast grief that had unbalanced her had finally been dissipated by her furious activity. Still, Daniel was cautious. A fortnight passed, and then a month, and still she behaved normally. He slowly relaxed his vigilance. But it was evident that the long road back to sanity had taken its toll. Her speech was slower, her mannerisms deliberate, and her hair had turned completely white. To restore her fully would take something more – perhaps the safe return of Aaron. Daniel redoubled his efforts to try and persuade the authorities to allow him to visit his brother.

47

The skirts of the Great War brushed past India. Over one hundred thousand Indian soldiers were killed or wounded at Mons and Verdun, Ypres and Gallipoli, but the subcontinent itself was threatened only briefly. Soon after the war started, a sleek whippy German battle-cruiser, the
Emden
, appeared off the coast of Madras and began shelling the sweltering city. The effect was remarkable. Around seventy thousand people, almost a quarter of the population, panicked and began streaming out of town. But a brave, or foolhardy, throng gathered on the Marina to get a closer look. To their disgust, the German warship decided that shelling Madras was poor sport and moved on to the Southeast Asian coast where she was eventually dispatched by the Australian battle-cruiser,
Sydney
. Three people died and thirteen were wounded as a result of the
Emden
’s brief foray into Indian waters, but she had made a powerful impression: for years to come, a bully anywhere in the Presidency was known as an Emden.

But the war had other, more far-reaching consequences. For a start, virtually all the political organizations previously opposed to the British closed ranks solidly behind them. The country’s new-found support for their rulers contributed to the collapse of the Extremist struggle in the south. Violent revolution continued for a while elsewhere, but in Madras it was only a matter of time before it was relegated to the status of a minor historical footnote.

In his spacious office overlooking the Marina, Chris Cooke was thinking about the revolutionaries and Aaron Dorai in particular. He wondered whether he would have been able to prevent Aaron’s involvement if he had revisited Kilanad district and Chevathar, as he’d promised himself he would. The thought made him feel guilty. Although he had managed to obtain a transfer to the districts after his first stint in the capital, he hadn’t served in Kilanad. Marriage and two children later, he had actually applied for a transfer back to Madras. His wife loved the city. There were better schools. And he’d begun to enjoy his work and the diversions of the metropolis. He made new friends, took part in amateur theatricals, enjoyed his excursions to Ooty in the summer – his life began to take on all the hallmarks of a privileged colonial.

When he’d received news of Ashe’s murder he had been horrified. But he had also felt for the star-crossed Dorai family. First Solomon, now his son. When would their troubles end? It had saddened him to have to refuse Daniel’s requests, but there had been nothing he could do. Until very recently.

The administration of British India was under pressure to feed the war chest and it had occurred to Cooke that this was the opportunity he’d been looking for. On the day that he’d received the circular from the Revenue Secretary asking him to step up his efforts, Cooke had written to Daniel. Aware of the other’s prosperity for some time now, Cooke wrote that a substantial contribution to the war effort might help Aaron’s case. He wasn’t promising anything, but . . . Perhaps it would be best if Daniel came to see him in Madras to discuss the matter.

A few days later, Daniel made the journey to the capital. When his assistant ushered him in, Cooke broke with ceremony and embraced Daniel warmly. How the serious young boy he remembered had grown! His face and bearing had acquired gravity, his manner was confident. He looked every inch the wealthy upper-class Indian gentleman that he was. Cooke thought: If for every one of us there is an age that suits us better than any other, Daniel, in his mid-thirties, was in his prime. But the strain of coping with Aaron’s tragedy was telling on him. He looked worried and anxious and Cooke felt for him.

Their business was concluded swiftly. In return for a large donation, Aaron’s status as a prisoner would be upgraded and the Government would even consider letting him off a year before he was due to finish his sentence. Daniel agreed promptly to the terms.

Cooke invited him to stay a couple of days longer when he learned that this was Daniel’s first visit to the capital.

48

Indian vs. Indian. We’re brilliant at it. Differences of caste, community, language and religion have split our society for thousands of years. All the more surprising, then, that in modern times we’ve acquired the wholly undeserved reputation of being a tolerant people, exemplars to the rest of the world on how to make a plural society work. In truth, we’re only happy to ‘adjust’ when it suits us, and our behaviour generally shows that we’re unable to handle the vast diversity that invests this nation. If we’re not actively intolerant we’re inert. This makes us fair game for loathsome casteists and communalists (usually priests and politicians) who are always willing to exploit the envy and resentment we nurse against each other.

When the British united India in the nineteenth century, they didn’t take away our essential Indianness – of which one definition would be the most total inability to make common cause with one another. Instead, they exploited our fatal flaw as it made us easy to control and rule. South of the Vindhyas, they latched on to one of the longest-running feuds in the country, that between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. In the past, the Brahmins had victimized the non-Brahmins but by the twentieth century there was the beginning of a backlash. Most of the leading lights of the independence movement were Brahmin, which earned them the displeasure of the rulers. Quick to seize the opportunity, some powerful non-Brahmin politicians decided to collaborate with the British. Their aim: to advance the cause of the repressed communities by seizing political power. The best known non-Brahmin party was the Justice Party, inheritor of the mantle of organizations like the Madras Dravidian Association, which had its formal baptism on 20 November 1916 with around thirty non-Brahmin leaders meeting in Madras to form the South Indian People’s Association. One of the favourite haunts of the Justicites in Madras was the Cosmopolitan Club in which Cooke had found rooms for Daniel.

Daniel had been invited to Cooke’s home for supper on his last evening in town. He had decided to wear European clothes, in fact a suit which he had worn only once in his life before, on his wedding day. He had allowed plenty of time for mastering the intricacies of knotting a tie but to his surprise he did it quite easily. He spent a few minutes walking around the room, getting used to the clothes, and then decided to practise his English. He knew the language well enough in a bookish way, but hadn’t used it for years. He had found his conversations with Cooke a trial, and was apprehensive about the evening. He muttered English phrases for a while, although he felt slightly foolish saying ‘How do you do?’ to an empty armchair. Then he wandered down the stairs to the vast lounge near the club entrance, where his host had arranged to pick him up. He ensconced himself in a comfortable chair, and picked up a copy of the
Mail
. As he was idling through it he became aware of someone staring at him. He looked up to see a remarkably ugly man, with fountains of hair jetting from his ears.