The House of Blue Mangoes (42 page)

Tears started from his eyes, the familiar emptiness took hold of him, but this was not Chevathar, no one went in awe of his tears.

‘Oh, the poor baby, maybe his mother needs to feed him our very special berries. I . . .’ but the senior didn’t have time to finish the sentence for Kannan had erupted from the bench. Somehow he managed to push the long table in front of him aside and drive straight for his tormentor’s body. He got in one good punch, but before he could land another, Lionel had recovered and had begun hammering him. Kannan didn’t stand a chance. He went down. Willing arms secured him. Lionel deliberately picked up a fistful of neem berries from the floor, levered Kannan’s mouth open, inserted the fruit and clamped his mouth shut. Kannan gagged and began spluttering. Abruptly, the pressure was released as Lionel said, ‘Let him up. I think we’ve taught the little pisser his rightful place.’

Spitting the berries from his mouth, Kannan launched himself again at the smirking senior. Hard, hurtful blows to his face and body dropped him. Twice more he got up to fight, and each time he was put down, the last time so hard that he almost passed out. He tried to get up, but his left leg wouldn’t quite support him. His tears were drying on his face, his body and head hurt, but there was no mistaking the anger that brightened his gaze. Watching him struggle to rise, Lionel muttered under his breath, ‘Game little mongoose, aren’t you?’ When it was clear that it was all over, the hall hummed with the sound of nearly a hundred pent-up voices. His aggression entirely replaced by solicitude now, Lionel helped Kannan up from the floor and supported him to the nearest bathroom, where the blood on his forehead was washed away. His face felt puffy and painful, he had some difficulty speaking and his leg bothered him, but otherwise he was okay. Lionel took him to his room, settled him comfortably and left. Scarcely had he gone when there was a tap on his door and another boy he’d never seen before poked his head in. ‘You fight well,’ he said admiringly, ‘I think that senior scarcely knew what to expect.’

Kannan grimaced and pointed to his mouth. The boy seemed to understand and said quickly, ‘I’ll let you rest now but if you want anything, just bang on the wall, I’m your neighbour. My name’s Murthy.’

65

As summer approaches, the vast MCC campus lights up as its most distinctive tree, the peltophorum or rusty shield-bearer, begins to bloom in great gouts of bronze and gold. By the time the peltophorums began to flower in the summer of 1940, Kannan was completely at home on campus. That first fight with Lionel Webb had provided a short cut to acceptance and he did not look back. The Anglo-Indian boys, more clannish than most, were favourably disposed towards him. His proficiency on the hockey field helped strengthen the relationship. But he spent most of his time with Murthy. His friend’s family owned a timber business in Coimbatore, and what began as a necessary alliance between small-town boys soon grew into a real friendship. They were both first-year botany students, inseparable in class where they formed the core of the back-benchers, and at the Hall where they took most of their meals together and spent hours gossiping and larking around. That summer when he went home for the holidays, Kannan discovered that he had already begun to grow away from those of his friends he had left behind, especially as his closest friend Albert had already left to study in England. He was impatient to get back to college. He missed Murthy, he wanted to feel the excitement of inter-collegiate hockey matches, he craved the varied attractions of college life – trips to the city, evenings spent exploring the hundreds of acres of campus, late-night coffee and gossip sessions. Chevathar suddenly seemed dull and provincial.

His father was delighted that Kannan had taken so well to college but privately he confided in his wife and Ramdoss that he feared his son might find it difficult to readjust to Chevathar. But that eventuality was still over two years in the future, and it could be dealt with then.

66

Across the road from the massive gates of the college straggled an uneven line of shacks that sold everything that cash-strapped college boys would need: cigarettes, tea so strong that you could stand an iron bar upright in it, snacks and juices, calendars and stationery supplies. Nair’s, the most popular of these, sold the best grape juice in Madras – black and thick as melted tar, and so sugary and concentrated that if you didn’t have a sweet tooth it would give you a migraine. The entrance to Nair’s shack was studded with flies. Most of them were so drunk from the juice that had spilled on the ground that they couldn’t even fly and were crushed underfoot as customers entered or left. Nair, a genial, bulbous-bellied man, presided over a very utilitarian establishment. Besides the biscuits, fruit and juice he sold, all he provided for the customer’s comfort were two roughly put-together wooden benches. These were occupied night and day.

One evening Kannan was at Nair’s, drinking grape juice and gossiping with Murthy. Earlier, one of the leading nationalists of the city, the former Prime Minister of Madras, C. Rajagopalachari, had addressed a meeting in the college. As a result of Daniel’s ban, Kannan was less than interested in politics, but Murthy was rather keen and certainly better informed about the rapid political developments in the country. Kannan had nothing better to do that evening so they had gone to the meeting. Soon, however, he was getting fidgety and suggested a grape juice at Nair’s. Murthy had wanted to stay but Kannan had prevailed.

From talk of the meeting, their conversation moved to their fellow students. Murthy, who was always full of gossip, was narrating an absorbing story that involved Dr Boyd, the principal, the residents of Bishop Heber Hall and Tambaram grapes when Kannan chanced to look towards the road. He forgot about Murthy altogether.

A girl had just emerged from the train station and was walking down the road towards the line of tea shacks. She was walking fast, her feet seeming to float above the ground, and there was about her an unimaginable lightness. The muscles in the pit of Kannan’s stomach contracted and his throat went dry. The hair she tossed out of her face, the pert nose, the slanting eyes: Kannan thought every detail of her was perfect.

‘Helen Turner. Every man and boy from here to Egmore would like to get to know her better, so you might as well forget it,’ Murthy said when he saw the look on Kannan’s face.

‘Tell me about her,’ Kannan demanded. ‘Who is she? Where’s she from? Why haven’t I seen her before? Why is she so beautiful?’

Delighted with the opportunity to gossip, Murthy launched into a description of Helen that was, to his credit, more factual than otherwise. The only child of a retired Anglo-Indian Posts and Telegraphs employee, who had built a small house for himself on the outskirts of the Tambaram Railway Colony, she had just started work as a secretary in an office in Guindy. She had hundreds of admirers but no one she went steadily with. She was best friends with a girl who was, if anything, more lovely than her, Cynthia . . . There was more, and Kannan absorbed every word he could. Finally, even Murthy’s powers of invention dried up, and he grew sick of the grape juice Kannan plied him with.

But Kannan had enough to go on. He had never gone out on his own with a girl before. The only girls he had even spoken to were his sisters and his cousins. But his obsession with Helen swept away all his inhibitions. He badgered every Anglo-Indian friend of his with the slightest connection to Helen, and finally managed to set up a meeting with her.

The encounter was an unqualified disaster. Kannan, who had been hoping and praying for a succession of miracles on the appointed day, was granted his first and last one immediately – there was no one at Nair’s, no crowd of gawking, jeering college-mates. He was early, and before the bemused eyes of the proprietor, he carefully rubbed down the benches, arranged and dusted the various jars and tins in the shop. Finally, having nothing left to do, and finding it impossible to get rid of the doormat of flies, he sat down on one of the benches and stared down the road.

The girls, for Helen was accompanied by Cynthia, were punctual. They sailed through the eddying flies, bestowed smiles upon Kannan, agreed to have a grape juice apiece, smiled twice more at Kannan when he dared to catch their eye, finished their juice and left. There had been exactly nine words exchanged between the three of them in the fifteen minutes they had spent at the shack, including ‘Hullo’, ‘Thanks’ and ‘Bye’. Kannan’s contribution to the conversation, besides suggesting grape juice, was ‘Erp’ as he had tried and failed to get a dialogue going.

Things got better after that first meeting, partly owing to Cynthia’s encouragement of the friendship, once she heard of Kannan’s father’s fame and wealth. Kannan did everything he could to ensure that Helen had a good time. He missed classes, he spent all his money on her and inevitably he failed all but one of his exams at the end of the year. The head of the department wrote to his father, threatening dismissal unless Daniel could guarantee an improved performance. He wrote disapprovingly about the ‘extra-curricular activities’ that he believed were to blame for Kannan’s dismal record. To Kannan’s good fortune, Ramdoss had had charge of Daniel’s correspondence for some years now and immediately suppressed the letter. He provided the guarantee that the college sought, and wrote Kannan a tough letter, exhorting him to study hard. That summer, Kannan didn’t return to Doraipuram for the holidays. Instead he pleaded with Ramdoss for money for extra tutorials, and stayed on in Tambaram.

In the 1940s, it was unusual for a young man and woman to go out together openly. But Kannan was too much in love to care what people thought. Tittering remarks, disapproving stares and unwanted advice were not about to deflect his obsessive love.

At first Helen didn’t much care for the gawky boy and continued to hang out with the handsome Anglo-Indian boys who kissed so well. It was Cynthia who put things in perspective. If she wanted to get out of the depressing world of the Railway Colony that she was always grumbling about, she told her friend, she should take Kannan a bit more seriously. Helen accepted her friend’s advice, but she was careful to let Kannan only slowly into her life.

The second year at college, Kannan once again failed two of his exams. This time the principal, Dr Boyd, wrote to Dr Dorai proposing a meeting to discuss his son’s imminent exit from the college. Again Ramdoss intercepted the letter. He paid a visit to Tambaram, met with the principal and told Kannan that, if he didn’t stop seeing the girl and start passing exams, he would find himself on the next train to Doraipuram.

Kannan was not unintelligent. He learned to manage his time better, with Helen’s encouragement. He cleared his exams and even received a letter of congratulation from his father, who usually confined himself to a line at the bottom of Lily’s letters to him. But the thought of giving up Helen never seriously took hold. He could do nothing with the rest of his life if it did not include her. He continued to meet her clandestinely. How could he not? She filled him with excitement, with a sense of the limitless possibilities that life offered.

67

The mantram has enormous power. If you figure out the one that’s right for you and repeat it incessantly, it will reach the very ears of God. Indeed, puny mortals are no match for the mighty mantram. As his battle with the British reached its climax, the Mahatma unleashed yet another of his unstoppable thunderbolts, the mantram ‘Quit India’. As millions of mouths whispered, roared, warbled, chanted, carolled, bellowed, lisped, drawled, wheezed, trilled and stammered it out, it grew into a relentless force. The British, weakened by war and no longer entirely sure they wanted an Empire, were powerless before it while it lasted. Both sides knew it would only be a matter of time before they left.

Speaking in the cluttered and busy neighbourhood of Gowalia Tank in Bombay in August 1942, Mahatma Gandhi told a rapt audience that it was time for the British to leave for ever. Quit India. Then he added a deadly little subclause to the great explosive command that would ignite the land. ‘Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you. You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is: “Do or Die”.’

The Government acted swiftly. The top nationalist leadership was imprisoned but all to no avail. The genie was out of the bottle. Although the Quit India movement would fade in the face of British intransigence, as had all of the Mahatma’s previous initiatives, it marked the beginning of the end of the Raj. The rulers didn’t help their cause by making several tactical blunders. The move that infuriated the freedom fighters the most was the imperial offer to grant the country partial freedom as a Dominion of Britain, when what was demanded was total independence.

Politics finally invaded Doraipuram. Ramdoss was on an inspection tour of the settlement’s outlying farmlands when he was horrified to see that a dozen palmyra palms had been amateurishly beheaded. He drove on, hoping to apprehend the culprits. He hadn’t gone far when he found a small group of boys and girls clustered around two of their number who lay sprawled on the ground. One had a broken leg, the other had sprained his back. They were students from a nearby college who had taken the Mahatma’s call to picket toddy and country liquor establishments a step too far by attacking the toddy palms themselves. One of them hailed Ramdoss: ‘Aiyah, we need to get our friends to the hospital. One has broken his leg . . .’

‘He should have broken his neck,’ Ramdoss said heatedly. ‘Have you donkeys no respect for private property?’

‘We are responding to the Mahatma’s call. He has said we must all do our part to drive the British out.’

‘Has he asked you to destroy your own country while doing so? I’d be doing an injustice to donkeys by comparing you with them. Come on, put your friends in the car.’

Daniel was unaware of the inroads that politics had made into the settlement. At about the time Kannan left for college, he had begun to retreat mentally into himself, tormented by the ills besetting Doraipuram. Physically, too, he had removed himself from view, disappearing into a suite of rooms – a bedroom, a room converted into a laboratory, a bathroom and a kitchen. He saw Ramdoss and Lily every day, and Kannan when he visited. He avoided the rest of the family. If they bumped into him by chance, they saw a dishevelled man, old before his time, with a straggly beard and bushy hair that sprouted from his ears and nostrils like smoke. He wouldn’t speak or make eye contact with them but scuttled back to his rooms as quickly as he could.