The House of Blue Mangoes (2 page)

The villagers rise early, but as it’s some way yet before the fields are to be prepared for the transplanting of rice, the men are not up and about. Most of the women have risen before dawn and are racing to finish their household chores. Today the village celebrates the Pangunni Uthiram festival and they’re hoping to snatch a few minutes at the festive market that’s being assembled, bright and tawdry, by the walls of the Murugan temple.

Movement on the tarred road. Two girls, one thirteen and soon to be married, the other a year younger, are on their way to the fair. They are dressed in their best clothes, the older girl in a violet half-sari, jasmine in her well-oiled and plaited hair, her cousin in a garish pink skirt. Their foreheads are adorned with sandalwood paste, vibhuti and kumkumam from the Amman temple where they worshipped before dayfall. They walk quickly, even though they’re very early, their feet light on the deliciously cool road, eager to get to the market. The older girl has been given four annas to spend by her mother. It’s a small sum but it’s more money than Valli has ever had before and she can barely contain her excitement at what she might be able to buy with it. Bangles? Earrings? Silk for a blouse perhaps, or might that be too expensive? Parvathi hurries to keep up with her cousin.

The girls pass a grey outcrop of granite polished by wind and rain to a smooth rounded shape that resembles the knobbly forehead of an elephant. Anaikal, as it is called, is popular with children playing hide-and-seek but they barely register this most familiar of sights as they hurry onwards. They enter a short stretch lined with banyan trees beyond which is the path that leads to the fair.

And then the younger girl notices them. ‘Akka,’ she says, but the remark is unnecessary for Valli has also seen the four young men lounging under the big tamarind tree that shades Vakeel Perumal’s house. The acute peripheral vision of the two girls, shared by every woman under the age of forty in the small towns and villages of the hinterland, is geared towards noticing just one thing: men. Sometimes it is exercised to give them pleasure as they flirt expertly even with eyes cast down. But more often than not it is used to spot danger. No young or even middle-aged woman is safe from the slyly outstretched male arm that seeks to brush and feel up, the crude insult, the lascivious eye, and so they learn early to take evasive action before things become unpleasant.

The two girls quickly assess the situation. The men are about fifty yards away and do not appear threatening. Still, there is no one about. Every instinct tells them to turn and retreat to the safety of their houses. But the promise of the new bangles is too strong. After all, just a few yards more and they’ll be on the dirt path which will take them to the market grounds.

The men under the tamarind tree begin to move towards them and now the girls are truly alarmed. They turn to hurry back in the direction of their houses but it’s already too late. The footsteps behind them gather speed and the girls begin to run. Terror sharpens their senses. They register with unnatural clarity everyday sights: the fire of shoeflowers against a limewashed wall, the waxy green leaves of a calotropis plant by the roadside, an orange butterfly on the road, and then everything begins to blur.

The younger girl keeps her head, or perhaps she just chooses right. She stays on the road and runs as fast as she can towards the huts of the tenant farmers barely half a furlong away. Valli veers off the path and begins running away from the river, through the acacia forest that clothes the uncultivated area by the Murugan temple. The horny soles of her bare feet negotiate the rough ground beneath her with ease but she is no match for her pursuers. Remorselessly they overtake her. She feels hands tearing at her clothes, hissed imprecations in her ears, she stumbles, goes down . . .

2

About two furlongs from the spot where the girls had begun their desperate run, Chevathar Gnanaprakasam Solomon Dorai Andavar, the thalaivar of the village, sat on the veranda of his house, deeply absorbed in the antics of a woodpecker. Round and round the furrowed trunk of the neem tree it went, and not for the first time the headman thought that the way the bird rose up the tree was uncannily similar to the manner in which his tappers ascended the tall palmyras to harvest toddy.

Clad only in a colourful lungi, Solomon Dorai looked as if he might have been carved from teak. There wasn’t an ounce of superfluous flesh on his forty-year-old frame, and his hair and moustache were luxurious and untrammelled by grey. For many years now, he had decreed that on Sundays and festival days he wasn’t to be disturbed in the morning on any village or household matter unless it was an emergency. The order was respected, not least because of the trouble that could be unleashed if it was ignored. This morning as usual he had risen before dawn, washed his face at the well, and then wandered into the courtyard to pluck a neem twig to chew on. He loved the tall stillness of the night at this hour when even the stirrings of the world were muted. Soon red would tongue into black, followed by the rest of the sequence that was so dear to him: the emerging of trees, hayricks and other familiar objects from the dark, the grumbling of crows in the casuarina trees at the edge of the compound, the lowing of cows impatient to be milked, all the comforting noises of his world.

The rich smell of jaggery coffee told him that Charity had come and gone, soundlessly, leaving the coffee in its customary place on the veranda. He drank his coffee so hot that he could only hold the tumbler between the folds of his lungi. Carefully he raised it to his lips and sipped. Excellent, as always. Then suddenly, for no reason that he could pinpoint, Solomon was no longer relaxed.

There was still some time to go before his barber would arrive to shave him, so Solomon decided to investigate the cause of his unease. Perhaps he could go down to the river, where he anyway wanted to inspect some newly planted mango trees, and then stroll as far as the Murugan temple to check that all was well. The watchman was probably sleeping off a drunken jag and there would be nothing to prevent strangers from wandering into the village. Ever since the deputy tahsildar had insisted on building his accursed new road to connect Chevathar to the town, you could not be too vigilant, he thought. Finishing his coffee, he rose to his feet. The discordant bray of a donkey drifted in on the breeze and he smiled, for it portended good luck. Perhaps his fears were groundless. No matter, it would be good to stretch his legs. As he walked across the beaten earth of the courtyard, the woodpecker flew away in a streak of green and yellow. He paused to watch its rapid jerky flight for a moment, then went down to the river.

The strangers were gone long before Solomon reached the Chevathar. One of them carried three bloody furrows on his cheek where Valli’s nails had scored him. They avoided the bridge and negotiated the shallows of the river instead. Once across, they melted into the countryside, as invisibly as they had come. Hidden in the recesses of the acacia forest was the only sign that they had ever been in the village: the barely conscious wreck of a young girl.

Standing at the river’s edge, Solomon worriedly stroked and pulled at his moustache. His anxiety had nothing to do with Valli; it would be an hour or so before she was found and the news conveyed to the thalaivar. What disturbed him was what lay before him. Since the Great Famine of 1876–8, he had never seen the Chevathar so shrunken in its course. Rocks poked out of the water like tobacco-blackened teeth, and it was only in the very centre that the current flowed, slowly and sluggishly. They couldn’t afford another drought. If the rains failed again, he and every villager in the area would suffer. For now the village looked green and fertile enough, but he knew from experience just how quickly everything could change. Only two days ago, a deputation had visited him, saying that their fields were showing traces of salinity. It was always a problem: as the river and the sweet water receded, the sea seeped in. If water became scarce, they could lose half their cropland. In perpetuity. And with drought and famine, there was the ever-present danger of epidemic.

His mind went back nearly twenty-one years to the time when eight thousand people, over a tenth of the district’s population, had died. Smallpox had followed drought and famine had swept away another ten thousand, among them his parents, his older brother, two younger sisters, two uncles and their entire families. Seventeen of the people who had made up his world, all sacrificed to the ferocious goddess, Mariamman. The only survivors in his immediate family had been his wife Charity, his younger brother Abraham, his sister Kamalambal and his dearly loved cousin Joshua. Solomon had come into his inheritance when he was barely twenty, as had many of the young men in the region.

Fortunately for the community, they had been spared epidemics over the next decade and a half. Also, the rains had held up, and the process of recovery slowly began. But barely had things returned to normal when the rains had started playing truant again. For the past three years, both the monsoons – the southwest and the northeast – had been below average and the Government had initiated drought relief works once more. Not entirely trusting to Government, the people had redoubled their prayers in temples, mosques, churches, wayside shrines and family pooja rooms. In our land, religion is expected to do everything, including feed the people, Solomon thought grumpily.

He turned from the river and walked up the bank to the newly planted mango grove. The sight of his beloved trees was usually enough to lift his spirits, but this morning they failed to work their magic. He sensed that his anxiety sprang from more than just the prospect of an erratic monsoon.

Could there be caste trouble in the offing, he wondered, as he bent to examine the healthy jade-green leaves of a mango sapling. The two dominant castes in the district – the Andavars, to which he belonged, and the Vedhars – had a history of strife, and he had heard rumours that there might be unrest in the trouble-prone areas of the north near Melur. He hadn’t noticed anything untoward here but he would go and meet Muthu Vedhar, the leader of the Vedhar villagers, later in the day, to see if there was anything troubling him. The Dorai family had kept caste violence out of the village for generations. Solomon wasn’t about to see that change under his stewardship. The day was quite advanced by now, and he decided to cut short his stroll and head back.

When he reached the Big House he was annoyed to find that the barber had still not arrived. One of the few things his father had taught him was the importance of being neatly turned out as thalaivar of the village. This meant a daily shave, whereas the average villager would be content with one every few days. Solomon was yelling for a servant to go and find the errant barber when his keen ears picked up a sound and he frowned.

He turned to look in the direction from which it came and what he saw displeased him greatly: three bullock carts coming leisurely down the metalled road. Solomon could not believe that his order forbidding traffic from town on festival days was being so blatantly flouted. It was the deputy tahsildar, he thought, no one but that son of a prostitute would dare cross him! His rage grew. So what if Dipty Vedhar was the top government official in the region; it was he, Solomon Dorai, who ran the village. Who was the young donkey to disregard him? First, he had gone and built the new road through the village, and now with his hunger for profit he was ignoring the thalaivar’s orders. Solomon stood irresolute for a moment, then walked swiftly into the house and into his room. On pegs driven into the wall rested a prized possession – his Webley & Scott twelve-bore shotgun. Solomon lifted it down, crossed over to a wooden chest, opened it with one hand, rummaged around in it and unearthed a box of cartridges. He put the gun down, took out two cartridges, loaded the weapon, and walked to the entrance of the house. The carts were less than a hundred yards away when he raised the gun to his shoulder and fired both barrels. A storm of barking erupted, with his own Rajapalaiyams leading the chorus. Still holding the gun, Solomon ran, lungi flapping, towards the carters. The sight of the enraged thalaivar clearly terrified them and, as one man, they leapt off their slow-moving vehicles and were preparing to run when they were stopped by Solomon’s loud voice: ‘Run and I’ll cut you down like motherless dogs.’

The carters protested ignorance of the thalaivar’s injunction. They were only following the orders of Kulasekharan, Meenakshikoil’s biggest dealer in palm products. They had been instructed to go down to the beach to bring back three cartloads of pure white sand, lately popular among townspeople for flooring wedding and religious pandals. The news angered Solomon further. Kulasekharan! His own kinsman! Ignoring his orders!

He ordered the carters to turn around and told them to inform the trader that they were prohibited from entering the village for a week. Then he returned to the house, more irritable than ever. As soon as he had bathed, he would go into town and have it out with the deputy tahsildar. Even as the thought crossed his mind, it occurred to him that the barber had still not arrived. And he couldn’t have a bath until he had been shaved. The polluting touch of the low-caste barber had to be washed away.

Fretfully, Solomon returned the gun to its rack and emerged into the courtyard. A few minutes of pacing up and down and he could bear it no longer; the day was advancing and he needed to bathe, shaved or not. What sins had he committed to be born in this ungodly time, where a kinsman could ignore his explicit ruling and where every ambattan thought he was a Pandyan king!

3

The morning had begun in the usual way for Charity Dorai. Up before first light, she had bathed, prayed, made the coffee and measured out the day’s food for the twenty or so family members in the house. The number of people under Solomon’s roof was never constant, but expanded or contracted depending on who needed his help or shelter, or both. Visitors would arrive for a week and still be there six months later. No one minded. Solomon was the patriarch of the clan, and it was expected of him, as it had been of the ruling Dorai since his great-great-grandfather’s time, to take in any member of the family who needed hospitality or succour.