The House of Blue Mangoes (66 page)

‘Shut up, Harrison.’

‘Watch how you speak to me, you young whippersnapper. Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t spent your working life fitting into a straitjacket devised by someone else? You look like a fellow who doesn’t put up with nonsense, so it must have been even more of a trial. Look at you, enunciating your words carefully, polishing your English manners, playing right into the hands of those who seek to keep you down. Why the hell should you not say Les-ester or Wor-sester or Chol-mon-de-ley when not one Englishman of my acquaintance can pronounce an Indian name correctly! And why should you not spit in public when the honking of a white man into his handkerchief would drown out a tiger’s roar? And do you really think the English oak is sturdier than the banyan and the thrush superior to the bulbul? And that the lotus is inferior to the rose? Is Tamil less than English? Why don’t these things make you angry?’

Kannan smiled ruefully at Harrison’s remarks; they could have been Murthy’s. He said, ‘Because I’m not a bitter old man like you.’

‘Forgiveness is for the birds. Forgive and forget is for the birds. You always need to seek revenge, it keeps you alive.’

‘You’re mad, Harrison, I’m not going to go your way.’

‘Oh yes, you will, if you want to remain alive to your own potential. Discard what you’ve learned here, it’s of no use. You can never be white, you’ve always known it, so why bother? Hope instead that you shake off the spell cast on you and wash away the white man in a roaring brown flood . . .’

‘It’s funny you should say that.’

‘What?’

‘That we should sweep away the white man like a river in spate, it was something that occurred to me . . .’

‘So you are capable of bitterness and rage! Life is not a tennis game. Nobody plays fair, and there’s no winner or loser. Your enemies will be with you, your demons will haunt you as long as you live, and the only way you will be able to survive from one year to the next is if you take opportunities like this. This will keep me smiling through the rest of the wretched life that’s left to me. Now push that bloody tiger over.’

Kannan bent over his task, then remembered something: ‘But why are you killing the coolies? They’re Indian. They’ve done you no harm.’

‘I’ve killed no one. You’re the one who is saying it.’

Kannan took the bamboo and began pushing. Slowly the tiger slid towards the emptiness beyond, then its forward motion stopped. Kannan took his hand off the pole and turned to face his tormentor. ‘I don’t trust you, Harrison, and I know I’m going to die. But, before you shoot me, I have one last question: Why did you agree to come with me to shoot the tiger?’

‘It amused me to see if I could succeed where the other bastards had failed . . .’

‘But don’t you see,’ Kannan said, suddenly hopeful, ‘you have succeeded. You’re a hero now. You can pick up the pieces again, the bad days are over.’

‘The bad days are never over, you young fool. My countrymen can never welcome me back because that would mean accepting someone who invalidates everything they think they stand for. And even if they did, what of it? A few months, a year of esteem, and then we’ll go back to how we once were . . . Enough of this.’ There was steel once more in Harrison’s voice. ‘Push the brute over. Now.’

Kannan picked up the fallen pole, thrust it under the dead tiger, and pushed as hard as he could. The body slid, stopped, slid forward again. Only a couple of feet more and it would all be over.

From an enormous distance, his mind took in the scene: two men (one hunched over a dead tiger) in a little rocky amphitheatre, and beyond them the precipice with its endless shifting mist, the setting sun casting it into a fretwork of light and shade. One more push and the heavy body began to topple forward on its own. The mist rose up to receive it and then it was gone, the huge black-and-yellow body looping and twisting in a curiously graceful movement, down, down, down. Kannan sank to his knees, eyes barely registering the whiteness before him, waiting for the crash that would signal the end. Would there be any pain, he wondered. The minutes passed and when the shot didn’t come, Kannan turned slowly, wearily, to look for his persecutor. Harrison, walking fast, had already reached the foot of the incline. Without pausing, the old hunter began to climb steadily into the closing dark.

105

By the time Kannan got back to Morningfall, the decision he had been mulling over was confirmed in his mind: he would leave Pulimed. Now that he had decided, he wasn’t sure what he should do. Join the freedom struggle or help with Doraipuram? Probably the latter. But there was time enough for that. First he must leave this place as quickly as possible. When he handed in his resignation to Michael, his Superintendent’s attempt to get him to change his mind lost its power when he realized how solid the decision was. It was agreed that he would leave in a week.

He attended the obligatory farewell parties, of which there were mercifully only two: one at the Stevensons’, which was strained and awkward, and the other at the club hosted by Michael, which was slightly more enjoyable although he greatly missed Freddie who wasn’t due back for a week. He deflected all questions about the hunt, not that anyone pursued the subject with any enthusiasm. It had been widely assumed that his attempt would end in failure. He supposed he would have told Freddie the truth if his friend had been around but there was no one else to confide in. He’d toyed briefly with the idea of telling Michael but had decided not to in the end. He was especially pleased with his response to Major Stevenson. Kannan was leaving the General Manager’s office after a brief interview on the day he’d resigned when Major Stevenson had said to him: ‘Just a tick, Dorai, did you manage to get a shot at the tiger?’

He’d paused for a moment, and then savouring every word he’d said: ‘I think it would be best if you checked with Mr Harrison, sir.’

On the morning of his departure he drove over to the Superintendent’s house to hand over the keys to his bungalow. Michael invited him in for a cup of tea. They chatted for a while, and then it was time to go. Belinda, tired and flustered after having spent much of the morning arguing with the maistri who was building new furniture for the spare bedroom, paused to say goodbye. Michael saw him off at the door. As they shook hands, Michael said, ‘So do you think being involved with the family settlement will satisfy you?’

‘I think so, sir, my mother and my uncle have their hands full. It’s time I helped.’

‘But is that what you really want to do? I know things have been rough around here but you are a good planter, Cannon. You could have an excellent career on the estates.’

‘I thought so too, sir, but sometimes you keep putting off the inevitable, knowing all the while that the decision has already been taken a long time ago, often without any conscious thought. It’s always been there, you’ve just taken a few twists and turns in the road before you arrive at it.’

‘Now you’ve lost me, with all this talk of destiny. What do you chaps call it, karma?’

‘Not bad at all, sir,’ Kannan said with a smile.

‘You’ve never seemed more Indian to me than you did just now,’ Michael said.

‘But that’s the whole point, sir. I am Indian, and I expect we just forgot that for a while.’

He found Andrew on the lawn throwing a tennis ball to Pixie, the family’s fox terrier. The little boy interrupted his play for a moment to wave and Kannan beckoned him over. ‘I have something for you,’ he said, ‘to remind you of me when I’m gone.’

‘Where are you going, Mr Dorai?’ Andrew asked.

‘Far, far from here, Andrew. I have a big job to do that I’ve postponed for far too long . . .’ He could see that the boy was anxious to get back to his game, especially since the dog was frisking around his ankles, and so he slipped his hand into his pocket, withdrew the tiger’s claw he had picked up after Harrison left, and gave it to Andrew. ‘Keep it safe. It’s a tiger claw,’ he said.

‘Gosh, Mr Dorai. Did it belong to a real live tiger?’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘How did you get it?’

‘That’s a long story, I’ll tell you another time.’ He ruffled the boy’s hair and walked to his motorcycle. As he kicked it into life, he glimpsed Andrew tearing towards the house, the dog panting along behind him. The boy held the tiger claw triumphantly aloft.

There was one more thing he needed to do before he headed down the ghat road to catch his train. He pointed the nose of the Norton towards the factory on Empress Estate. It was a misty day and his spirits soared. He would miss this sort of weather in the plains. He slowed the motorcycle down, the better to feel the touch of the mist on his face. As the wetness wrapped itself around him, he gave himself over completely to the sensation of experiencing the world of the estates for what he was sure would be the last time.

And then he was at his destination, an old silver oak that was locally called the swing-in-swing-out tree. The mist was thinning and the tree stood, a lonely sentinel, on the hairpin bend that led to the Empress Estate factory. Beyond it was a sheer drop. It had come by its name because it offered an interesting challenge to anyone foolhardy enough to attempt it. The usual manner in which the hairpin bend was negotiated was slowly and with care, but one mad drunken night Joe Wilson had swung his motorcycle full-tilt at the tree and had miraculously pulled it out of the spin that would have sent him tumbling down to the rocks below. Nobody had succeeded in doing it since, always aborting the stunt at the last minute.

Kannan stopped the Norton short of the tree, then eased in the clutch and slowly motored around the bend. Turning the bike, he returned to the position from which he’d started. He emptied his mind of the consequences of failure and sat astride the motorcycle a while longer, gently revving the throttle, watching the mist swirl around the bend and the tree, allowing it to enter his mind. He let in the clutch, put the motorcycle into gear, revved the big machine and roared forward. Nearer and nearer the tree loomed, the vehicle and rider rushing at it. He aimed the nose of the Norton all the way in . . . drawing all the rage and frustration of the past few months into himself, winding it into a tight burning knot, letting it inflame him. Swing in. As the machine began to skid towards the drop he fought gravity and the power of the engine to reverse direction. A moment of panic, the abyss yawning in his head, and then the motorcycle began to respond slowly to his touch, and then quicker and quicker. The tension and the fury exploded out of him, streaming away, freeing him from their powerful hold. Swing out. The road ahead stretched before him and he accelerated away.

106

So many of the members of the extended family descended on Doraipuram for the Christmas celebrations of 1946 that they ran out of sleeping space. At Neelam Illum, Lily, Ramdoss and Kannan opened up rooms that had been locked and shuttered for years. Makeshift beds and sleeping mats were unrolled in every room in every house in the settlement, and finally even the church was taken over. Pews were pushed to one side to make room for the hordes of first, second and third cousins and their families from far-flung corners of the world. Not since the memorial service for Daniel had Doraipuram seen such an influx, and nobody could tell exactly why everyone to whom an invitation had been extended had decided to show up, along with others who hadn’t even been invited. Perhaps it was because the war was well and truly over. Perhaps they were drawn by the promise of freedom. Or perhaps they came because the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the colony was less than a year away, and they wanted to make sure that they connected with Doraipuram, for who knew what the next twenty-five years would bring. And so they poured in, those who carried the place permanently in their hearts and those who had never set eyes on it – spoilt American cousins from Metuchen and Mississauga, British relatives with strange accents from Kensington and Birmingham, one family who made the journey from faraway Napier – all drawn to the colony on the banks of the Chevathar.

Within days of their arrival they had sunk into Doraipuram’s embrace. The foreign cousins quickly lost their airs and accents, brushed out of their systems by the hard fists of the Doraipuram gang, and settled down to enjoy themselves. They scuffed bare feet in the red dirt of Chevathar and they wobbled around on bicycles that seemed to have been manufactured in some unimaginably ancient age. They gawked at the well Aaron had jumped and they poked around in the ruins of Kulla Marudu’s fort, giving the old cobra, which was now almost blind and white with age, no peace at all. They swam in the sea and the river, they re-enacted Solomon Dorai’s epic battle on the beach, and they wandered through the mango topes hoping against hope that the occasional tree might be fruiting out of season. The energy and resources of the eighty-three permanent residents of Doraipuram were tested as they tried to cope with the visitors, who outnumbered them two to one, but they rose to the occasion magnificently.

This was Kannan’s second Christmas in the settlement since his return and he realized he was enjoying it much more than the first, feeling an integral part of everything that went on around him. He was delighted to meet many of his old friends although the closest, Albert and Shekhar who had emigrated to Vancouver and San Diego respectively, couldn’t make it. Bonda, who was now employed by a bank in Melur, was one of the early arrivals and they spent hours reliving their childhood. All across the settlement old friendships were renewed and new ones forged, as the extended Dorai family gave itself over to a huge and tumultuous reunion.

Christmas Day was the culmination of days of frenetic activity and it began early. By seven in the morning the church by the sea was packed to overflowing, everyone impatient for the day to get going. Over half the congregation had had less than two hours of sleep, having spent the previous night tramping from house to house singing carols and wrapping presents and consuming vast quantities of food and drink that mothers and aunts and servants had churned out without pause. The moment the padre had finished his sermon, a group of teenaged cousins, under the leadership of Daniel, now in a senior class at the Government High School, broke out guitars and maracas and the church bulged with the sound of carols sung one last time that year with verve and enthusiasm. Spinster chithis and decrepit thathas clapped their hands and sang along, and even sour old Karunakaran could be seen tapping his feet to the music.