The House of Blue Mangoes (27 page)

He hurried through the rest of his patients, impatient to be back in the laboratory. He worked through the evening, and when it got late, he sent one of his assistants home with the message that he would spend the night at the vaidyasalai. He didn’t return to the cottage for five days and nights. At the end of that time, sixty-four metals, herbs, oils, unguents and other ingredients had been mixed, tested, retained or discarded. On the morning of the sixth day, Daniel looked down, exhausted, at a brown jelly that lay at the bottom of a retort. It looked like thickened gingelly oil. He smeared it liberally on his left arm. Every day for the next month he applied the lotion to his arm, taking care that water did not touch the treated portion. To prevent anyone from seeing the results of his experiment he began wearing long-sleeved jibbas. His arm began to smell decidedly odd but Daniel was undeterred. When Lily asked Charity to intervene, she shrugged helplessly and said, ‘When the Dorai men are in the grip of an obsession, even an elephant in musth cannot move them.’

At the end of five weeks, he exclaimed in delight: that portion of his left arm where he had applied the lotion was discernibly lighter in colour than the rest of his skin. He made more of the formulation and coated his entire arm with it, rubbing it in briskly until it had vanished without trace. Nine weeks after he started rubbing the potion into his arm, there was a noticeable bleaching effect, but not too much to be alarming. Daniel added a colouring agent to make the mixture a pleasing shade of white and filled a small glass jar that was normally used for dispensing thylams. All the time he had been experimenting he had been dreaming up names, but there was only one he truly liked. He wrote it out on a piece of paper, in English and in Tamil –
DR DORAI’S MOONWHITE THYLAM
– and sat looking at it for a long time. Then he walked home in the dark.

Daniel postponed his departure to the clinic the next morning. Lily, vastly pregnant now, was beginning to get Shanthi ready. Triumphantly, Daniel pulled out his whitening cream and asked her to use it on the child. When his wife hesitated, he showed her his left arm, the colour of slightly overdone wheat. Within days, his family were converted to the cause.

Over the next weeks, stories about the miraculous new cream spread through the town. The vaidyasalai could scarcely keep up with the demand, and to Daniel’s astonishment, the bulk of the patients at his door, fully half of them poor villagers, now demanded a half-anna bottle of
MOONWHITE THYLAM
(it was also available in a bigger bottle for six annas) along with their other medication.

41

The new century was scarcely a decade old when it seemed that the nascent Indian nationalism was about to wither and die. Moderates and Extremists had gone their separate ways, vulnerable in their disunity to the oppressor’s blandishments. The British, it appeared, had won the battle before it had even begun. As a frustrated patriot of the time, Aurobindo Ghosh, announced dejectedly upon his release from prison, ‘When I went to jail, the whole country was alive with the cry of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation, the hope of millions of men who had newly risen from degradation. When I came out of jail, I listened for that cry, but there was instead a silence. A hush had fallen on the country.’ Small groups of young men and women in India and abroad decided that the only way forward was to try and force the pace. In Bengal, in Maharashtra, in London, in Madras, they plotted and planned. Aware that any mass movement would need years of preparation, the young revolutionaries decided that the quickest way to put the Raj on the defensive was to wreak excessive violence on its officials.

A month after he joined the Bharatha Matha association, Aaron received a summons to attend a meeting in Trivandrum. The venue was a low-roofed cottage on the outskirts of town. The house looked quite ordinary, beaten earth courtyard, the leaves of banana trees flapping in the breeze, chickens scratching around in the dirt, a woman in a mundu and blouse sunning herself on the front steps. For a moment Aaron thought he had come to the wrong place, then Neelakantha stood framed in the doorway. He beckoned him in.

The house had rooms opening off a muttham open to the sky. It was here that the meeting took place. Aaron recognized several from Neelakantha’s group among the twenty or so present. They were told that they had been selected for a special mission and that they would spend the next weeks training for it. They were to assemble at four the following morning, ready to leave for an unknown destination.

Travelling by bullock cart and on foot, deeper and deeper into Travancore, Aaron and twelve others reached Thengatope, a small village on the Malabar coast, late that evening. The towering coconut palms which gave the village its name were so thickly clustered that they could only dimly glimpse the Lakshadweep Sea. The headman of the village was sympathetic to the cause, and the village itself was so remote that there was no risk of sudden discovery. They were divided into two groups, each allotted a hut. Neelakantha led Aaron’s group. The thirteen men, of whom three were instructors, had two pistols and a bolt-action rifle between them. The recruits began to practise assembling and dismantling the firearms. As ammunition was scarce, they pointed the weapons and clicked the triggers on empty at coconuts lined up on the beach.

The days soon fell into a regular pattern: up at dawn, they would set off for a run, weaving between the palms and acacia trees, keeping a lookout for the long white acacia thorns that littered the ground for much of the route. The last part of the run, the hardest, was on the shifting sands of the beach. Aaron, who had thought his slight limp would be a disadvantage, discovered that his natural athleticism gave him an advantage over most of the others in the group, especially the city boys. The run was followed by breakfast, a thin kanji that tasted awful, then came weapons training, followed by a session of exhortation and discourse. The polemics and wisdom of Marx, Alfieri, Annie Besant, Aurobindo Ghosh, Subramania Iyer, V. O. Chidambara Pillai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak formed the foundation of the indoctrination. Aaron found the instructor hard to follow, and unimpressive, and after the first couple of days he switched off. He noticed that most of the others were as bored as he was. At the end of the first week, the instructors as well as five of the recruits returned to Trivandrum. The next day the five that remained, Neelakantha and Aaron among them, were joined by a top leader of the organization who would complete their training. Aaron had admired and respected men like Iyer and some others he had met, leaders with courage, dash and a fierce commitment, but next to M. S. Madhavan they seemed like callow youths. Their new mentor was a slightly built man with a fine-boned face and a deliberate way of speaking. It was his gaze that betrayed his essential nature: flat and unblinking as a viper’s, his eyes hinted at the hard man beneath the ordinary exterior.

His arrival galvanized the camp into frenetic activity. Madhavan was urbane, sophisticated and had travelled the world to sit at the feet of masters of the art of violent revolution and terror. Aaron respected the man’s prowess with small arms, and he listened with something approaching awe to the tales of his time with Berbers and Russian revolutionaries in exile. The group clung to Madhavan’s every word but their undisguised hero worship seemed not to have any positive effect on him. No matter how much he tried to conceal it, it was clear that he thought them a bunch of bumblers.

After a couple of days, Madhavan unveiled a marvellous new rifle that he had brought with him, a rapid-fire, bolt-action .303 with a six-bullet magazine. He had with him a plentiful supply of ammunition as well, and for the next days, the roaring waves of the Lakshadweep Sea provided a backdrop to the spiteful flat crack of the Lee Enfield.

A month passed. Then, one morning, Madhavan announced that their training was over and that they would leave on their first mission the following day. He wouldn’t give them further details, saying only that they would be thoroughly briefed before they set out. That night, Aaron left the camp and walked for a time among the coconut palms, his mind seething with thoughts that were jumbled and confused like the choppy surf that broke on the shore. This was it, he thought. Now there was no withdrawing. He thought about his father, his Joshua-chithappa, his friends back in Chevathar. If I die, my only regret will be that I died among strangers, he said to himself. And then he dismissed the thought as cowardly. It was the sort of thing Daniel would think. He hadn’t thought of his brother and his mother in a while and he wondered how they would feel if they could see him now. They would probably beg him not to go through with whatever lay ahead. Weak, weak, always weak, he was glad he was rid of them.

As he was returning to camp he heard Madhavan’s voice and paused, unseen, behind a coconut palm to listen. Madhavan was telling Neelakantha how substandard they all were – as human beings, as nationalists, as fighters in the cause of the country and freedom. ‘The devas will need to come down to help our motherland if this is the army that is going to kick the white man out.’

Aaron heard nothing more as Madhavan and Neelakantha walked out of earshot. He would show them just what he was made of tomorrow, Aaron thought savagely. He would make that cold-hearted viper beg his forgiveness for misjudging him.

They were up at five. Dressing by the aluminium gleam of the early morning sky, they moved out. Madhavan had briefed them about their objective: a police station across the border in British India. They would attack it and destroy it, decamping with whatever weapons and ammunition they could find.

Travelling by bullock cart, and on foot, they finally reached their destination two days later: a few huts rising out of the dun-coloured earth, on either side of a dirt track. The track led to a limewashed building that glowed white in the harsh light of day. This was the new police station that had been built to house a unit of riot police who would keep the peace in the area, which was known for its unrest. The unit hadn’t arrived yet and the building was under the command of a head constable. For a day and a night, Madhavan and the group observed the activities of the head constable and the two men in his charge. The next morning, one of the policemen was called away to another village to investigate a theft. That left the head constable, a middle-aged man with a pronounced belly, large sad eyes, thinning hair and a slight stoop, and his subordinate, a callow village boy, with big ears and the beginning of stubble. The head constable spent most of his time in his house, a hut slightly bigger than the others, a couple of hundred yards from the station. His subordinate lounged about on the veranda of the new building, gazing out at nothing.

On the evening of the second day, Madhavan told them their mission. They were here to assassinate the head constable. The group was aghast. They had spent over thirty hours observing the man. It was plain to see that he was nothing more than a harmless village policeman – father to the seven children they had counted in the hut, husband to the poor woman who worked from morning to night. They had watched the man during his hours of duty, dressed in his threadbare uniform, and they had observed him at rest, gossiping outside the hut, dressed only in a lungi, his belly bulging like a landslide. They couldn’t kill him.

‘Your target is a decent man,’ Madhavan remarked after a short silence. ‘He takes only enough bribes to fill his belly, he tries not to be oppressive, he has lived here all his life, he has seven growing children (he lost two to smallpox), he does not have a mistress, he beats his wife only when absolutely necessary and then only sparingly, he’s a good father and provides for the family, wasting only a little of his money on toddy. He’s a good man, much like your own fathers and uncles and brothers. But he’s also a representative of the white man, and for that you will kill him. Slowly and painfully, in the presence of his wife and children, so that your act will be accurately transmitted to the authorities. Your murder of him will leave his wife and children bereft, the baby will probably die, and the girls will not marry well. You will kill him, knowing all this, because he is a symbol of the oppression that grips this land. And by killing him, you will free yourself of any inhibitions that might constrain you from acting in the interests of our noble and just cause.’

Madhavan could have been speaking to stone statuettes. Even Neelakantha looked shocked. The policeman yawned and lit a beedi, his discoloured teeth visible to the watchers concealed less than twenty yards away behind a rocky hillock.

How do you kill a man? In cold blood? If you’re a man like any other, a thinking, feeling, insecure man trying to lead a reasonable life, a man who is not in the grip of a great rage, a normal man, how do you kill a man who has done you no harm? Do you think of him as a disgusting envelope of shit and piss and dirty thoughts, whom it would be a blessing to erase from the pitiful piece of earth he occupies? Or do you paint him as a monster so that you can eliminate him with ease? The realization dawned on them that no amount of prevarication could conceal the awful truth – that their target was a man not very different from themselves, who lived and breathed, who could be so wearied by living that on occasion he could think how blissful it would be to live no more, but yet went on, day after day, getting on with the business of living, trying to make sense of life, to do his job, to escape the wrath of his superiors, trying to keep his wife and children fed. Was it possible, through some extraordinary sleight of mind, to see this poor ineffectual functionary of the state as the
ENEMY
?
Could they? Could they?

As if reading their thoughts, Madhavan’s voice sliced through their confusion. ‘Clear your minds of all this emotional nonsense,’ he said icily. ‘Treat him like you would an animal. Track him as he moves, the foresight firmly aligned with the notch of the V on the rear sight, cheek steady against the stock of the firearm, safety off, finger crooked around the trigger. Don’t pull, but squeeze as you would the breast of your beloved, adjusting for his speed. Squeeze all the way through. Aim, track, squeeze . . . Practise the sequence over and over in your head, it will soon obliterate any misgivings you might have!’