The House of Blue Mangoes (44 page)

Cynthia looked slightly bemused.

‘Please, please, Cynthia, please tell me you’ll talk to her, you’re the only one she’ll listen to. Please tell her that I’ll do everything in my power to make her happy if she decides to stay with me.’

‘Was she ever yours, I wonder?’ Cynthia said.

‘I don’t know, but if she was mine, I’d make sure that she never regretted it.’

‘And how would you do that, men?’

‘I’ll get a big job. I have a letter of recommendation from a very important man, Mr Chris Cooke, a senior ICS officer. I’ll be better off than I ever could have been working for my father. Please tell her, Cynthia, I know you can do it . . .’

‘Well,’ Cynthia said, looking dubious, ‘I’m not promising anything, but I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said fervently. ‘Tell her that all I want is to talk to her. Try and convince her that things will work out all right.’

Two weeks later, Cynthia proved as good as her word. One of his hockey team-mates banged on Kannan’s door early in the morning and said jovially, ‘Wake up, you good-for-nothing son-of-a-whore. Cynthia wants to talk to you.’ When Kannan opened the door, Philip said cheerfully, ‘Eleven o’clock at Nair’s,’ and sauntered off.

Cynthia was sitting with some friends, but as Kannan approached, they got up and left with friendly waves. A burst of laughter, and they were gone. Had they been laughing at him? Probably, but he didn’t care. Kannan ordered two glasses of tea with extra sugar, then turned eagerly to Cynthia. ‘Will she see me?’

‘Yes, I’ve persuaded her to see you, just the once . . .’

‘Cynthia, you’re amazing. You’ve worked a miracle. How can I ever thank you?’

‘By calming down and listening to me. I’ve got Helen to agree to talk to you, not accept you as her husband. Nothing might come of your meeting, so don’t get your hopes up.’ Their tea arrived, steaming hot in dirty-looking glasses. Cynthia looked at him, long and speculatively, then said more kindly, ‘You’re really in love with her, I can tell that much.’

‘I would stop at nothing to please her. I’d strip the sky of its clouds and make a bed for her to lie on.’

‘A poet,’ Cynthia said with a smile. ‘I believe you’d do all that and more. And Helen knows it. Probably knows too that you love her more than all the others.’

‘There have been others?’ Kannan said.

Cynthia’s face took on a wisdom beyond her years. Despite his overwrought state, Kannan had a flash of insight. He saw the pretty nineteen-year-old two decades from now, a stout lady in a shapeless dress, with at least a dozen children but with a heart big enough to accommodate a thousand more. She would put up with a demanding husband, cantankerous neighbours, the myriad annoyances of a lower-middle-class existence in a poor country, but she would also be the backbone of her locality – a fund of wisdom and patience and tolerance. Cynthia didn’t know it yet, but there was an unquenchable humanity within her that the world would crowd to.

‘There will always be others for beautiful girls like Helen. The only problem in a hypocritical society like ours is that men have fantasies about girls like us, but never respect us. Some of you lust after us from afar just because we wear skirts and pants and go to dances, others whisper to us under their breath, or brush past us on trains. And then there are our own boys, people like Philip and Sammy and your friend Lionel, who are the sort of people that Helen and I will end up marrying, even if they will never be rich or famous, because they love us for what we are, beyond the lust they feel for us, and because they aren’t hypocritical double-dealing Indian bastards.’ Having delivered herself of this, Cynthia sat back, her nostrils flaring with anger. Kannan was stunned by her outburst, not least because of the profanity he had heard. From a girl!

Cynthia smiled, a smile that was much too cynical for her age, and said, ‘Shocked? I’m sorry. You’re quite decent for an Indian. And don’t go thinking badly of me because of the bad words I use and because I said Helen and I have had other boys fall in love with us. We’re both of us good girls, and we can’t help it if boys keep asking us out. But we don’t do bad things, as you Indians think.’

‘Why do you keep calling us Indians? Aren’t you Indians too?’

‘No. We hate this country and we want to go home. To England or Ireland. My grandfather was Irish, and Helen’s was a British sergeant posted here.’

‘Have you ever met your grandfather?’ Kannan asked.

‘No. Yes,’ she said, flustered. ‘I mean, he’s dead.’

‘Have you ever been to Ireland?’

‘I’m going next month, as soon as I can get my passage booked,’ she said, then quickly changed the subject.

‘Do you love Helen very much?’ she asked.

‘I love her with every fibre of my being.’

‘Oh, yes!’ Cynthia laughed, and then she turned serious.

‘You adore her, Kannan, so you have elevated her to the position of a goddess, free from every blemish, but I’m her closest friend. I’ve known her since we were little girls playing in the alleys of a dingy government colony. The walls of our houses were so thin you could hear the neighbours fart. There is no privacy in places like that, Kannan, and when you’re best friends . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I want only the best for her. But I know her faults. I know when her breath smells bad, and she has said something stupid. I know her secrets. Things that you will probably never know. But this much I can tell you. Her deepest desire is not to end up in one of the colonies she grew up in. She would like, best of all, to live in England. Do you think you could manage that . . .’

Kannan stammered, ‘I . . . I . . . could . . . try . . .’

But Cynthia went on as though she hadn’t heard him. ‘Failing that, she would like to be married to a man who has status and money and a position in society. A nice house, a car, a job. You won’t like me saying this, but that is why she encouraged you, because of your father’s money and name. She’s not a bad girl, and it’s not a bad thing to want the things she wants, and she does like you a lot.’

‘I will make her happy,’ Kannan said, glad to be able to say something.

‘How?’ she asked. ‘If you marry Helen, your father will never take you back, you’re a college student with no money, no prospects. Nothing. Why should Helen accept you?’

‘I’ll work hard, get good marks. I’m sure I’ll get an excellent job because of Mr Chris Cooke’s recommendation.’

‘Why has he given you a recommendation, if your father’s so angry with you?’ Cynthia asked suspiciously.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Use it then. Study hard, get the best job in the world, and then maybe you’ll have a chance with Helen.’

‘I’ll do it, just wait and see. You don’t know about us Dorais,’ he said.

‘See you do. And now I suppose you’ll want to know when you can see her.’

‘Yes, yes, yes . . .’

‘Next week. But she will only see you when I’m around. And after this meeting, you are to communicate with her only through me . . .’

Kannan hardly heard her as, his eyes shining and his heart thundering in his ears, he fell to contemplating his meeting with the woman who had given him no rest.

‘Lucky Helen,’ Cynthia said softly to herself.

71

The interview that Chris Cooke had set up for Kannan with Major Stevenson, the General Manager of the Pulimed Tea Company, had gone very well indeed. He would start work at the end of the year on their estates, located high in the central Travancore hills across the border. He would be the first Indian creeper the company had ever hired. On the train back to Tambaram, he thought how happy Helen would be. He could see just how they would be, in a very short time from now, splendid and certain of their place in the world. Then his mind flew back to the days in Doraipuram and the showdown with his father. If they hadn’t fought, he was sure appa would have been proud of him, making his mark in the white man’s world. And then it occurred to him that if his father had not rejected him, he would never have had this opportunity. And now there was nothing for Kannan to do but to strike out on his own, show his father what he was made of.

The train began to slow down as it approached the station, and his mood brightened. The future was opening up for him. For them.

BOOK III

PULIMED

72

The great German battleship
Bismarck
swirled rapidly down the storm drain, harried by her pursuers, the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
and HMSS
King George V
and
Rodney
. ‘Tishkwoo-tishkwoo,’ went the
Bismarck
’s guns, but the waves of American dive-bombers were unrelenting in their attack, and the British gunners in the ships that followed fired with deadly accuracy. It was clear that the
Bismarck
didn’t stand a chance. ‘Krea-aagh.’ The HMSS
Victorious
had just loosed off a torpedo. ‘Brrhoom.’ A direct hit. The principal architect of the
Bismarck
’s destruction, eight-year-old Andrew Fraser, pressed his second-in-command, Kannan Dorai, into service. ‘You take the
Victorious
, Mr Dorai. I want you to move her to that side, and go “Krea-aagh”.’

‘Can’t I make some other noise?’ Kannan asked.

‘No, you cannot,’ Andrew said firmly. ‘Krea-aagh is a torpedo noise, and you must make a torpedo noise because HMSS
Victorious
is firing torpedoes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Kannan said, positioning his ship as directed. Satisfied, the little boy went back to the sinking of the
Bismarck
. His knowledge of World War II was encyclopaedic and Kannan had little doubt that the armature, guns, speed and tonnage of every ship, plane and support craft in the battle that was being enacted was absolutely correct.

‘A little more to your right, Mr Dorai. Torpedoes away.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Kannan said, making his torpedo noise. This was drowned by an even louder noise, as the
Bismarck
began to founder. A succession of tearing and wrenching sounds issued from Andrew’s mouth and the 45,000-ton ship started breaking up. In moments it was over.

‘Let’s do it all over again. Maybe this time, the
Bismarck
can be the
Graf Spee
. I want to try and see if I can make the sound of her shells being fired.’ Kannan was impatient to go for a walk, but he didn’t really want to disappoint the little boy. He’d try and speed up the battle, that way he’d still be able to stretch his legs before they started for the club. If the rains held off, that was.

As Andrew began gathering up the ships, preparatory to beginning the next battle, Kannan wandered to the edge of the garden. Looking out across the mist-filled valley he could see that the monsoon had truly set in.

Kannan had never experienced anything like the rainy season in the hills. Up in the high tea country it drizzled most of the year anyway, but during the monsoon the rain spat continuously down from a sky the colour of chilled steel. Unlike the warm downpour of Doraipuram, the rain in the hills was cold. And it never let up. Day after day, he would struggle into clothes that never seemed dry and walk into a world where the sky hung low, grey and troubled. Great banks of cloud and mist (it was hard to tell where the one began and the other ended) were hurled across the cowering hills by driving wind and rain.

But, unlike most of the other planters, Kannan actually liked the monsoon. He wouldn’t have minded his clothes drying faster and an umbrella that was designed to cope with Pulimed thunderstorms, but he enjoyed the cold and the wet, the constant sound of water echoing through the misty hills and valleys and the aqueous daylight. He didn’t mind that he almost never saw the sun. And he was mesmerized by the mist. He loved the feel of it on his face, and its infinite malleability and movement. He could spend hours watching it, stirring restlessly or streaming noiselessly across the tea, standing still in the hollows or filtering smokily through the trees – a great ivory vastness that altered the material world he gazed upon, so it seemed he was in a dream. And then, abruptly, movement of water within air, a swift, ever expanding flurry, and the mist would lift from the quiet world, leaving it fresh-minted and refreshed, every colour burnished, every surface new. After the tired, dusty, heat-bruised plain, this was magic and he let it enter him freely.

He had arrived in Pulimed a little over six months ago and had been assigned as a creeper to Michael Fraser, the Superintendent of Glenclare Estate, the largest of the three estates owned by the Pulimed Tea Company. Glenclare had over a thousand acres of tea, constituted into two divisions. The Morningfall division’s Assistant had gone off to fight in the Burma campaign, and if Kannan did well during his year as a creeper he would be promoted to that position.

He felt someone tugging at his sleeve. Andrew was impatient to begin the next battle. He had just got the little ships, skilfully fashioned out of bamboo, wooden clothes pegs and matches, ready for action and was demanding that Kannan join him at play. The storm drain was enveloped by the sounds of war once more.

After the
Graf Spee
was blown up, Andrew suggested they go and hunt for leeches in the old quarry behind the house, where the rainwater pooled during the monsoon. Kannan hated leeches but was saved from refusing the boy by the appearance of Andrew’s father.

Michael Fraser was lanky, with a lugubrious cast to his face, and a wonderful smile that transformed his entire countenance. Kannan had taken to him instantly, as he had to Michael’s wife, Belinda. And the liking was mutual. A lot of Kannan’s colleagues had been unsure how to take the news of his appointment when the General Manager had announced it. For his part, Michael had been worried about how his wife would react to the announcement that he was bringing an Indian to spend a year in their spare bedroom. But it had all gone smoothly. Kannan was well-spoken and polite, and after his initial nervousness, had fitted nicely into the household. Michael was pleased that Belinda and Andrew had taken to his young Indian creeper. They led lonely enough lives, and it made a big difference to them to have someone else around.

As far as Kannan was concerned, if things hadn’t gone so smoothly he doubted that he would have survived on the estates. Despite his liking for his superior and the weather, he’d been unhappy during the first couple of months in Pulimed. This was partly because he realized he might never see Doraipuram again, but had more to do with the reality of Pulimed. He was amazed at how white and ‘foreign’ the tea district was. He’d had English professors at college of course, but here India had been pushed to the margins. It had seemed that
he
was the outsider. Fortunately for him, he’d adapted quickly and had soon begun to enjoy the place.