The House of Blue Mangoes (10 page)

Solomon stood by the wall of the mission compound, looking out to sea. He was dressed formally: gold-embroidered turban, dusty black coat buttoned at the collar, a new white veshti. He even wore shoes. When Father Ashworth walked up to him, he returned the priest’s Easter greeting mechanically and continued to look out to where the sea lay shimmering, a rich confection of gold and green.

‘Why did you accept them into the Church?’ Solomon asked finally.

‘It is not for us to judge those who hunger for God’s Word.’

‘Vakeel Perumal does not hunger for anything but his own importance.’

‘Didn’t our Lord Jesus Christ take the humblest, most ill-suited vessel to carry out His work?’

‘I doubt whether our Lord would have been able to use Vakeel Perumal. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him using the Lord for his own purpose. He is a lying, crooked, mischief-making rascal and I don’t think you and I can even begin to imagine the consequences of this conversion.’

The object of their conversation was looking a bit lost. He looked around not a little anxiously. The Reverend Ashworth smiled at him, which was enough for Vakeel Perumal to break away from his group and make his way over to them. The priest greeted the lawyer cordially, and stiffly Solomon followed suit.

‘I’m very pleased that I can now call Solomon-aiyah a true elder brother,’ the lawyer said unctuously. Fleetingly, the thought of what the headman might do to him if he discovered that he was responsible for the Pangunni Uthiram troubles shook Vakeel Perumal’s composure, then his elastic conscience came to his rescue. How could he be held responsible if the incompetent thugs had attacked the wrong girl! Without giving the matter another thought, he said to Father Ashworth, ‘This is the most wonderful religion, padre, and the stress it lays on forgiveness means Solomon-aiyah and I can put the past behind us and become part of the universal brotherhood of the one true Lord. In fact, there’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you, Solomon-anna . . .’

Solomon managed to suppress the retort that rose to his lips, but only just. He didn’t bother to conceal the disgust Vakeel Perumal’s presence roused in him. Glaring at the priest, who pretended not to notice, Solomon abruptly turned on his heel and went to join his family. The lawyer’s face fell, then grew furious.

Adding to Father Ashworth’s discomfiture was the fact that the Dorais left without pausing to sample the Easter lunch.

16

Before genetics, electricity and modern irrigation techniques confused the seasons, the farming communities of the deep south ordered their lives by the monsoon. Through most of the region there was but a single harvest, which meant that for six months of the year the villagers were furiously busy, and then for the next six months time lay heavy on their hands. The first monsoon clouds streamed out of the Indian Ocean in June, crashed into the Western Ghats, and shed rain on the parched land. The princely state of Travancore and other points north and west got the lion’s share of the southeast monsoon, but even the scanty showers they received meant the difference between full bellies and the spectre of starvation for the farming communities of Kilanad district. Besides, the heavy downpour in the mountains brought rain-fed rivers such as the Chevathar to life.

As the first showers fell, the rice fields were ploughed and readied for sowing. Rich landowners, like Solomon Dorai, had their own ploughing animals but the tenant farmers had no option but to rent bullocks, thus increasing their indebtedness. The rains increased in intensity and frequency, and the rice was transplanted from seedbeds into flooded paddies by the village women, a thankless, backbreaking task, somewhat alleviated by song and neighbourly chatter. When the monsoon was bountiful, the paddies were soon thick with young rice, green and bright as an emerald dove.

The grain ripened on the stalk and then the northwest monsoon swept in. This time the farmers prayed that the rains wouldn’t damage the standing harvest. Finally, green having turned to gold, the rice was ready to be reaped. The villages filled with activity – the busy days of the harvest, followed by a myriad other tasks: stone or wood grindstones threshing the last vestiges of grain from rice stalks, heavily laden bullock carts trundling single file along dusty paths shadowed by great banyan trees, vast hayricks being built in the yards and fields . . . If the crop was bountiful, January was a time to celebrate. During that most auspicious and lively of festivals, Pongal, the villagers rejoiced with new clothes, gifts, song, dance and worship and, most traditional of all, the boiling of new rice from the first harvest, fragrant and sweet as a baby’s breath. After the exhilarating days of Pongal, the short spring would commence, and in years of good harvests when money and goodwill were not in short supply, everyone looked forward to the great festivals of March and April – Ram Navami, Pangunni Uthiram, the beginning of the Tamil New Year, Easter, Madurai Shri Meenakshi’s wedding, Mohurram, and wrapping up the first half of the year, the dramatic Chitra Pournami festival that took place on full moon day in late April or early May. In good years, the villages exploded with joy, warmth and religious fervour. In bad years, when the granaries were empty, they exploded because anger, hunger and frustration brought out the worst in the villagers. At such times, the festivals became occasions of strife, abuse and bloodletting.

It was Solomon’s custom to visit all the villages he owned in the dry months of April and May to check their preparations for the coming monsoon. This year he had sent his brother Abraham to visit their land in the southeast. He himself would travel to the north and the west.

From the beginning of the month, drums had sounded in various temples. The drumming increased in intensity as Chitra Pournami approached. Normally, the first pre-monsoon showers should have hit the dry, parched fields and river beds, the cue for the farmers to begin their frenzied preparation of rice fields. But this year, although the sky grew rough and scaly with clouds, no rain fell. As the last week of April arrived without a whisper of rain, Solomon grew worried. One more drought and he would need to petition the Government for help in digging wells and he knew how slim his chances were. He himself was fortunate. He had mixed crops and at least some of them would continue to provide revenue. But his mango groves, paddy and cotton would suffer if the rains failed. And how would he provide for the tenant farmers who rented land? And the other villagers in his care?

Thankfully, Muthu had held his peace and even Vakeel Perumal, or Peter Jesu Perumal as Solomon should now remember to call him, had not caused any difficulty. When his brother Abraham returned from his visit, his report was less than encouraging. On the spur of the moment, Solomon decided to set out on his own inspection tour the next day. He promised Father Ashworth that he would be back in time for Vakeel Perumal’s baptism, set for later that week.

There would be no time to alert the headmen and overseers of the various villages but perhaps that was just as well: he would be able to see for himself just how bad the situation was. He ordered three covered carts to be ready to leave before daybreak.

A brain fever bird piped them out of the village before dawn. The carts creaked and rattled through a closed and sleeping world. They made good time on the metalled road and were soon at the bridge across the Chevathar. In Meenakshikoil a few pariah dogs barked desultorily at the little convoy, but soon gave up. They took the main road out of town, heading north. Huddled in a blanket, Solomon could smell the sharp acrid tang of his magnificent Nellores, their horns shaped like an embrace. He whispered a command in the ear of the cart-man, who gently twisted the tails of the bullocks. That was all the encouragement they needed; their trot became a canter, then a dead run. Solomon was exhilarated. The nippy morning air, the smell and rhythm of his bullocks at a gallop, this was what he lived for.

The moon was almost full and it hung low in the sky. They had probably an hour and a half until daybreak. A couple of miles on, they turned off the main road on to a dirt track. During the rains this path would be a treacherous morass, but now the dust lay soft and fine as rice flour, the cart’s passage leaving a long brown streamer hanging in the still air. Their progress slowed but not by a lot; the bullocks knew the way, and needed little urging to keep up the pace. They flew past isolated little huts of palm-thatch and mud, rushed through villages that slept and still they kept on under the pale light of the moon.

Sometimes their path would run along the Chevathar and it saddened Solomon to see the cracked and dry bed of the river. He remembered the time, nearly twenty-five years ago now, when Joshua and he had decided to follow the river all the way to its source. It had been the monsoon season and about ten miles upriver the Chevathar had become a monstrous swollen beast, full of turbulence and violence, as it sought to free itself from its course. Their journey had been interrupted at a place where the river had breached its banks, rendering the road impassable, and they’d had to turn back. Although they’d promised themselves that they would try again the coming year, they had never done so.

As the carts rattled on beside the shrunken river, Solomon tried to follow it in his mind’s eye to its beginnings as a tributary of the mighty Tamraparani. Their boyhood ambition had been to get to the headwaters of the Tamraparani itself, where it rose on the slopes of Agastya Malai, the mountain to which the great northern sage Agasthiar had retired after giving the Tamil country its language, grammar and enough myth and legend to support several generations of priests, scholars and scribes, not to mention releasing the Kaveri from the confines of his water-pitcher, vanquishing hosts of demons and asuras, drinking up the water of the ocean to enable the Devas to exterminate their enemies who had taken refuge beneath the waves and, most famously, commanding the Vindhyas to stop growing until he returned from his sojourn in the south, which of course he never did. From its source Joshua and Solomon had planned to wander along the course of the river – down the Southern Ghats, across the vast Tinnevelly plain and all the way to the Gulf of Mannar. River of pearls, rajahs and rishis, the Tamraparani was only seventy miles long but it had been celebrated from the most ancient times and had firmly lodged in their imagination. As, of course, had the Chevathar. A mere stream at twenty-eight miles in length, it had certainly not been exalted in poetry, myth and travelogue, but still it was their river and it had always been a regret that they had never been able to complete the journey. Perhaps he would still make it, especially if Joshua were to return.

The convoy turned right at a tumbled mass of boulders. The road began to rise but the Nellores made light work of the climb and they had soon topped the incline and were in a rougher, less cultivated world, where the dead fields with their blond stubble of hay and rice stalks gave way to flat-topped acacia and gnarled outcrops of gneiss and granite. The young Sub-Collector from Ranivoor had once told Solomon that the rocks in this area were among the oldest in the world. What stories these stern silent witnesses could tell, he thought. There was need for caution now, as the cart-track had almost petered out and knobs of stone rose abruptly out of the ground. A cart could lose a wheel, or worse, an axle. They slowed to a trot. A village assumed shape and solidity as light began to trickle into the world. There had been a short, sharp caste riot here a few years ago in which four people had died, but now it looked peaceful enough. They rattled through it, a cacophony of sound – cocks crowing, dogs barking – marking their passage. The few villagers who emerged from their huts silently watched the three carts pass. And then they were through.

Ahead rose the great palmyra forest, the cockaded palms tall and erect. Eighty-seven acres and the bedrock of the Dorai fortune. All around them the land glowed a deep red as though the intense heat of summer had plunged deep within the earth and taken up permanent residence there.

A polished sky of crimson and rose hung low over the palmyra forest; any lower, Solomon Dorai thought, and the spiky tops of the trees would score its smooth surface. The toddy tappers were already at work, for they couldn’t leave their trees unattended, even briefly, when the sap was flowing during the hot summer and monsoon months. He got off his cart and watched a climber begin to ascend a palm. The man, short, wiry and almost as black as the trunk of the tree, slipped a short loop of rope around his feet, then took a little jump and gripped the rough, serrated bark with the instep and soles of his feet and his powerful arms on which the muscles rippled like silk. Clasping the tree tightly, he surged upward with a series of smooth jumps, moving as fast as a man walking on level ground. At the top he reached for the fleshy spathe of flowers and made a delicate incision with a small curved knife he carried. From the folded lungi which was the only garment he wore, he took out a small earthen pot. He secured this to the spathe and descended. Every day when the sap was running, the tree would yield three to four litres of sweet toddy. This precious ‘nectar of the Gods’ would either be allowed to ferment to produce the strong country liquor that was the staple of most of the villagers or it would be boiled down in cauldrons by women to make delicious jaggery.

A few of the toddy tappers recognized Solomon and came forward, snatching off their turbans, tying them around their waists and bowing deeply. One of them shouted something and a cup, deftly fashioned out of a palmyra leaf, was deferentially handed to the thalaivar. Another man brought up a pot of freshly milked toddy, unfermented and sweet, and poured it into the cup. Solomon lifted it and drank deeply. The taste exploded on his tongue. He accepted another cup as he talked to the tappers. The sap was flowing strongly this year, they said, but if the rains were poor they couldn’t be so sure about the next harvest. The palmyra was a tough palm (a prerequisite for anything that wished to thrive in the inhospitable wastes of the red teri plain), sinking its roots up to forty feet below the ground to find water, but even it needed rain.