The House of Blue Mangoes (32 page)

‘I’ll leave immediately for Ranivoor.’

‘No, give it a fortnight or so, I’ll need to get all the paperwork in order.’

‘But my brother is not too bad?’

‘I’ve been assured that he isn’t, but I should also tell you that in allowing you to go to Ranivoor I’m doing so in express disregard of Aaron’s wishes.’ Cooke’s voice grew gentle. ‘I hope you’re able to see your brother, Daniel.’

There was nothing more to be said. Shortly afterwards Daniel was driven back to the club. All the way there he stared unseeing out of the window as the city shut down for the night. The unlit buildings crowded down on the vehicle. He thought they looked like tombstones.

The car swerved to avoid an old man clad only in a tattered lungi who had stepped suddenly off the pavement. Daniel was jerked out of his reverie. He asked the driver to slow down, then settled back into his seat. His conversation with Cooke had only served to confirm what he’d suspected, but still the revelation that Aaron did not want his family to visit him was deeply depressing. Why did his brother hate them all so much? He remembered how much he’d been wounded by Aaron’s rejection of him, but this tragedy had overwhelmed everything else. Now all he wanted was his brother back, for himself, for Charity! He smiled sadly as he remembered his mother telling him about the time Aaron was born. Until the new arrival could walk, Daniel had been his most zealous protector, constantly hovering around the baby, but the minute he took his first tottering steps, he would look for every conceivable opportunity to knock him down. ‘Quite the little terror you were. We had to watch you constantly to ensure the little one didn’t suffer any permanent damage,’ Charity had said. Was that where the breach had been born? How absurd, he thought.

As the car rolled down Mount Road, he began checking off everything he would need to restore Aaron to full health. If the TB wasn’t too far advanced, it should be easy enough to control. All it needed was the right diet, plenty of fresh air and water. And if all went well, Charity need never know, for the disease would be under control by the time Aaron had finished his sentence. His mind grew calmer as he grappled with the practical aspects of his brother’s present situation. As the car pulled into the driveway of the Cosmopolitan Club, he thought, I do not believe that we cannot be one family again.

49

Superintendent Rolfe had lied. Aaron Dorai was critically ill with TB when he was transferred to Ranivoor Sub-jail. He had instructed the prison doctor to prepare a report for Madras that hid the prisoner’s true condition and quickly arranged to transport Aaron to his new destination.

He personally delivered news of the transfer. Aaron was in the infirmary, a hot airless box with seven beds next to the kitchen. Paan stained the discoloured walls and the room smelled of vomit and shit. The Superintendent, who rarely visited the infirmary, stood by the door and shouted: ‘Dorai, you are to be transferred tomorrow. God help you and don’t die on me, you little shit.’

The prisoner’s eyes opened and a light glowed deep within his pupils. The skin stretched across the bones of the wasted face moved, and with a mounting sense of incredulity Rolfe realized the prisoner was attempting to smile. Rage swept him. He wished he could pound the hated face to a pulp, extinguish the life within that skeletal body, erase this abomination from the face of the earth. But the threat of retribution from Madras was too strong. He turned and walked out of the door.

Aaron Dorai was transferred seventeen times in his first five years in prison. This was because the Government was determined to prevent the growth of popular centres of resistance around the revolutionaries. Also, to break their spirit, they were treated very badly, whipped and put into solitary confinement on the slightest pretext and given the dirtiest tasks to do. In some prisons, the Superintendent was more humane than others, but Aaron was always given the worst jobs, the worst quarters, and was punished for the least infraction. In Coimbatore jail, he was made to draw the heavy oil press; in Palayamkottai jail, he was given the dreaded jute-cleaning detail, where the skin was literally flayed from his palms; in Sivakasi jail he was set to breaking rocks like a common labourer. But it was in Melur jail that he almost died.

Superintendent Rolfe hated the new prisoner, the only one of the conspirators to be transferred to his jail. He despised natives anyway and the fact that they had dared to take the life of an Englishman enraged him. If he’d had his way, every one of the conspirators would have been tortured before they were shot. He would have done more, he thought; he would have instantly executed a hundred Indians and ordered every native to crawl on his belly when they approached within a hundred yards of a European.

When he had first set eyes on the skinny prisoner, eyes enormous and feverish in his drawn face, he was taken aback. How could this rodent have taken on the English? He soon found out. He had him whipped thrice in his first week, and immured him in solitary confinement throughout that time. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break the prisoner’s spirit. Rolfe didn’t give up. Every morning, he would have Aaron brought to his office for a little sport. He would taunt and abuse him, and try to devise new methods of abasing him. Aaron would remain impassive and unflinching through the torture and ridicule, further stoking the fury of his tormentor.

One morning, Rolfe walked across to him and slapped him hard. ‘I want you to go out on the street, with the warden here, and publicly announce that you are a son of a whore . . .’ For the first time during his sessions at the Superintendent’s office, the prisoner spoke without being forced to. He said, ‘You’re mistaken, Superintendent. It isn’t my mother you are thinking of, it’s yours.’ If he’d hoped that such a provocation would quickly end it all, he wasn’t far wrong. Rolfe beat him furiously but methodically, before finally turning him over to the prisoners whom he charged with meting out suitable punishment to obstreperous inmates. In his jail, as in some others in the Presidency, these prisoners were called Black Caps and were usually the most violent and sadistic. Rolfe told them to be careful. He had almost fallen for the oldest trick in the book, he thought, but Aaron wouldn’t escape so easily. And besides, he had explicit instructions: political prisoners were not to become martyrs to the cause.

A huge lifer called Sethu, in jail for murdering his wife, seven children and in-laws, was given the task of carrying out Superintendent Rolfe’s implicit orders. Aaron was cornered in the canteen. His feet were swept from under him, and two rapists pinned him down. They stretched his good leg on one of the metal tables and Sethu, with the delicacy of a surgeon, broke every bone in it. His tool was a length of metal pipe. Aaron’s screams only stopped when he passed out. A half-hour later, when the prison doctor examined him in the infirmary, his verdict merely reaffirmed Rolfe’s faith in Sethu’s expertise. The skin on the foot wasn’t even broken, but Aaron would never walk without assistance again.

He was assigned to the cumbly-weaving section, where wool was immersed in lime, then treated, carded and woven into coarse blankets. The prisoners worked in a large, dingy room where wool dust hung in the heavy air. One day Aaron collapsed, spitting blood. The prison doctor diagnosed tuberculosis and prescribed rest and better food than the cold lumpy kanji and pickle that was the usual prison fare.

Rolfe disagreed. ‘Just make him well enough to get him back to work.’ As soon as Aaron was able to leave the infirmary, he was issued with a pair of wooden crutches, and on the first day of his release the Superintendent was delighted to see his crutches knocked from under him whenever Sethu and his fellow inmates needed to amuse themselves. Aaron never complained. His eyes would blaze with anger but he would say nothing. He was assigned once more to the weaving section.

In less than a month his condition had deteriorated so much that he was coughing almost continuously. The prison doctor told Rolfe bluntly that the prisoner wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks if he weren’t given an easier job. Rolfe assigned him to lavatory detail.

The lavatories at the Melur Central Jail had become so noxious that the panchama prisoners, whose responsibility it was to clean them out, had gone on strike. They had refused to yield to any blandishment or threat. Finally, Rolfe had hired scavengers from outside to do the job. He had no option but to pay them five times their usual rate, so he economized by cutting down the frequency with which the lavatories were cleaned from once a week to once a month.

The lavatories stood at the farthest end of the prison, a row of six sheds with a cement hole in the centre of each. They had been built for the needs of sixty prisoners, but the jail now had seven hundred inmates. The smell that emanated from them had spread to every corner of the prison. From a distance, all you could see was a moving black carpet of flies that crawled, buzzed and flew over the excreta that coated the floor of each shed. As it had been some time now since they had last been cleaned, they were, without exception, inches deep in urine dotted with turds like islands. Indeed the lavatories were so filthy that the prisoners had taken to defecating outside, leaving little hillocks of excrement all over the place.

Superintendent Rolfe dispatched a warden to fetch antiseptic from the infirmary. He and the warden dipped handkerchiefs in the antiseptic, wrapped them around their noses and went to see how Prisoner No. 114301 was doing in his new job.

They found Aaron sitting with his back to a wall, staring blankly ahead, his crutches by his side. Flies crawled over his face, eyes, mouth and hair, but he made no attempt to brush them away. The stick broom, his only implement to clean the filth, lay in a pool of urine.

‘Get him back to work immediately,’ the Superintendent screamed, the rage in his voice somewhat muted by the cloth covering his face. The warden picked his way delicately through the excreta, then swung a foot at Aaron. ‘Start working, you miserable bastard,’ he yelled.

Aaron did not react.

The warden kicked him again, so hard that he toppled over on his side. He lay there for a moment, then slowly righted himself. He made no move to pick up the broom. The warden’s foot lashed out once more, but Aaron seemed as indifferent to him as to the flies that clouded his face. In a fury, the warden began working him over, crashing kicks and blows on his meagre frame. When he had beaten him into a stupor, he and the Superintendent unbuttoned their trousers and urinated on the unconscious man.

While Aaron was recovering in the infirmary, Superintendent Rolfe received the transfer orders. The prisoner was allowed a good bath, his hair (that was almost white with lice eggs) was shaved, and he was given a set of clean clothes before beginning his journey to his new home.

50

Daniel was saddened, then infuriated, when he saw Aaron in the Ranivoor jail infirmary. The place was airy and new all right, but this wasted human being was on the verge of death, not slightly ill with TB. He conferred with the Superintendent and the young prison doctor, who was clearly in awe of him, and it was decided that while Daniel was in Ranivoor, he would be in charge of his brother’s treatment.

For some time after he’d arrived in the infirmary, where Aaron was the only occupant, his brother continued to sleep, his breathing rough and tortured. Daniel sat by his bed, his mind a whirl. He’d waited for so long for this moment, there had been so much that he’d wanted to say to his brother, but Aaron’s condition had completely unsettled him. He’d wanted to tell his brother how much he loved him, how much his family wanted him back, but he’d also intended to reproach Aaron for the pain he’d caused them, especially Charity. Now there could be none of that. This man needed all his skills as a physician if he were to survive, although deep down, Daniel knew that his efforts would probably be futile. He knew when a patient was too far gone. It made him despair, but he fought the feeling; it wouldn’t do for him to give up. If he did so, Aaron would have no chance whatsoever.

He didn’t know how long he waited, but he suddenly realized that his brother’s eyes were open. He recoiled inwardly from the hate in Aaron’s gaze.

‘Get out. Let me die in peace.’ The effort of speaking led to a bout of coughing. Blood speckled the cloth Daniel used to wipe his lips. With great difficulty Aaron spoke again. ‘Why are you here? You abandoned me, so why come now?’

‘I never abandoned you. Appa sent me away.’

‘Thank God. Or we’d be licking the dust off Muthu Vedhar’s feet.’

‘Thambi, if we had appealed to Muthu Vedhar’s good sense, maybe we could have bought time. Avoided the battle.’

‘Avoided it. Are you mad? And will we get rid of the British that way too?’

Aaron closed his eyes as he tried to control a cough. When he opened them, Daniel said, ‘You shouldn’t talk. I’ll go now, but if you need anything I’ll be close by.’

‘Why are you suddenly feigning concern? Get out, you disgust me.’

A great storm of coughing racked his skeletal frame. Daniel beckoned frantically to the prison doctor who had just entered the infirmary. A quick-acting sleeping draught was administered to Aaron. He should come back another time; he knew his presence was agitating the dying man. Reluctantly Daniel left the infirmary soon after his brother had fallen into a restless sleep.

At the cheap boarding house, which he had chosen for its proximity to the jail, he tossed and turned and then, giving up the idea of sleep, went and stood by the window, looking out at the refuse-strewn alley below. Daniel couldn’t remember Aaron and he fighting much as children, yet there had been little common ground between them from early on. They were different, so unlike each other that it was hard to believe they were born of the same parents. But had they actually disliked each other all their lives, hated the fact that they were united by blood when it was evident that nothing else bound them? No, no, it couldn’t be so. Daniel had always loved his younger brother, even when Aaron wanted nothing to do with him. It was evident Aaron still hated him, but surely it wasn’t impossible for them to come together? Oh Aaron, he thought sadly, I’ve been denied you all our life; now, God willing, perhaps we can forget our differences, begin again. There was so much they could do, the sons of Solomon unleashed upon the world. They had both travelled great distances in their lives, suffered defeat and tasted victory, and they would be unbreakable! They would put the past behind them. They were both strong enough and together they would take on every challenge, big and small. Thank you, Lord, for bringing Aaron back to me, Daniel thought. Your ways are inscrutable but please grant us one chance at a future together.