The House of Blue Mangoes (29 page)

Late that afternoon, the women of the house gathered in the backyard of the cottage. It was tiny, and mostly occupied by the towering cashew-nut tree. A small papaya grew by the wall, and next to the outdoor privy, a hibiscus bush spread its glossy green foliage. Rachel’s husband Ramdoss had had to return to Tinnevelly that day and Daniel had gone to see him off. Jacob was taking a nap in his room. So the women had this time all to themselves. Miriam, who had joined them briefly – making peace, Charity thought – wandered back into the house. Just then Jason was nipped by a tiny red ant that he’d taken too close an interest in. Gathering the three older children around her, Charity began to educate them about the ants that swarmed around the backyard: the harmless quick black ones with raised bottoms could tickle you to distraction, but not so the tiny red ones that oozed along the ground in formation – their bite could sting. She showed them large ponderous black ants, shiny as papaya seeds, wandering slowly along the fissured bark of the cashew tree, and warned them never to go near them: their formidable pincers could make their little bodies swell with poison. And then, hoisting a granddaughter on each hip, with Jason trailing behind clutching her sari, she quartered the yard for the most dangerous of them all, the black-and-red kaduthuva ants. When she found one she killed it with her foot and showed it to the children. ‘Remember the pisasus I told you about, who would take you into their awful world deep within the sea and eat you up, bones and all? This ant is worse than the pisasus. If you see one, keep as far from it as you can, do you hear me?’ The children nodded, wide-eyed with wonder and terror. Well pleased with herself, Charity deposited them with Rachel and Lily, then took herself off to the kitchen.

As she prepared the meal that evening, a memory of Aaron insinuated itself into Charity’s sense of well-being. Instantly her mood grew less buoyant. Where was her beautiful boy, she wondered. What was he doing now? She shook off her gloomy foreboding. Aaron will be all right; God is watching over him, and one day he will return. As she bent to light the fire she gave thanks for her perfect day. Even the shadow cast by Aaron had its place in it: too much happiness wasn’t good for you; it was bound to be followed by great sorrow, as the world tried to keep the balance.

44

As the assassins trained in their remote rural camp, the top leaders of the various revolutionary organizations met to choose the next target. Several names were proposed – High Court Judges, District Magistrates, Collectors, members of the Governor’s Executive Council, the Governor Arthur Lawley himself. And discarded – not prominent enough, too well protected, too obscure, too well liked. Gradually the list of names was whittled down to three: L. M. Wynch, the Tinnevelly District Collector who had harassed and arrested the great Swadeshi leader V. O. Chidambara Pillai; A. F. Pinhey, the Additional Sessions Judge who had sentenced him; and R. W. D. Ashe who had fired on unarmed protesters in Tuticorin and was now District Magistrate of Tinnevelly. Ashe chose himself in the end.

The group received the news of their next assignment fatalistically. Vanchi Iyer was selected for the job. Sankara Iyer and Aaron Dorai would back him up.

The trio tracked Ashe for a week. They made an attempt to assassinate him at his house, but alert sentries deterred them from entering. Vanchi decided to try again in a public place in broad daylight when their quarry’s guard was down. On 17 June 1911, Ashe and his wife left town on holiday. They drove to Tinnevelly Bridge Junction and were escorted to their compartment in the waiting train. It wasn’t due to leave for a few minutes and they settled into their seats. The whistle blew. Just then the District Magistrate was surprised to see a skeletally thin man who looked ill, dressed in a green coat and a white dhoti, his forehead liberally plastered with vibhuthi, enter their compartment.

‘Reserved, reserved. Not allowed,’ Ashe said, waving his hands. Too late he realized that the Brahmin was no unwitting interloper. As the pistol materialized in the stranger’s hand, Ashe took off his sola topi and flung it at him. It was pitifully inadequate as an act of defence. From their vantage point in the station, Sankara and Aaron heard the pistol pop, watched Ashe slump, saw Vanchi flee the scene. The assassin ran into a lavatory on the platform and the pistol popped again. Aaron and Sankara melted away into the crowd.

The police acted with remarkable dispatch. Of the nineteen conspirators whom they were looking for in connection with the Ashe murder, one escaped to Pondicherry, one cut his throat and another swallowed poison. M. S. Madhavan was shot in Virudhunagar when he tried to kill the policemen tracking him. Fifteen men stood trial, Neelakantha Brahmachari and Aaron Dorai among them. Nine of the accused were convicted under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code and received prison sentences. Aaron was sentenced to six years’ rigorous imprisonment.

45

Early one morning when Charity entered her father’s room with his coffee, his posture suggested that something was wrong. When she checked, her worst fears were confirmed. Charity was surprised by how calmly she took her father’s death. When Solomon died, her grief had been wrenching, but at her father’s funeral the predominant feeling she had was one of peace. She thought: he’s a good man, that’s why he was blessed with an easy death.

They decided to bury Jacob without waiting for his son to arrive. The journey from Nuwara Eliya would take too long. As she looked upon her father’s face for the last time before the casket was sealed, Charity was struck by something. In all my years, she thought, I have not once thought of my father by name. By custom and tradition I have used honorifics to distance and revere him – I need something more. The assembled mourners saw Charity’s lips move and thought she was whispering a prayer, but all she said was, ‘Jacob, Jacob Packiam.’ The name sounded rusty and unfamiliar in her mouth but she repeated it over and over again, and even as she named her father she made him her own in a way that she had never quite done before. The loss hit home, and she broke down and wept by his coffin.

A fortnight later there was another death to mourn. Rachel died giving birth to her third child, a daughter who didn’t survive her mother by more than a few hours. Charity was beside herself with grief. Ramdoss had recently accepted an offer from Daniel to help with the expanding business. He had been in the process of moving to Nagercoil when disaster struck. The sight of Rachel’s beloved children, already confused by the move and now without a mother, made Charity push her own grief to the back of her mind. She must not let her grandchildren down; she must not let her daughter down.

Through all this, Aaron’s capture and arraignment formed a grim backdrop. Daniel, pitched into the unfamiliar role of head of the family after Jacob’s death, tried his best to get to see his brother. He wrote to every person in authority he could think of, asking for help. His greatest hope was his father’s friend Chris Cooke in Madras. But Cooke pleaded his inability to help. The Government was making no concession to the conspirators. They were determined to make an example of them. Aaron was accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an official of the state and there would be no leniency. Still Daniel hoped . . . that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that his brother had been wrongfully detained, that he was innocent. When Aaron was sentenced to prison, the family’s grief grew so vast and intolerable that it exhausted them of every emotion. They went about their daily routine mechanically, and the cottage grew still and cold. The children forgot their natural exuberance and crept around the house like small sullen animals, and even Miriam didn’t throw a single tantrum, pitching in as best she could with her mother and sister-in-law. Visitors who came to condole left as soon as they could, shocked by the immensity of the family’s sorrow, and secretly glad that it hadn’t been allotted to them instead.

When Aaron began his jail sentence, Charity finally broke. For a dozen years, her estrangement from her son had been a hard knot of pain at the centre of her existence and now it expanded and blotted everything from her world. Daniel first became aware that something was wrong when she woke him one morning with his coffee. As was usual, he was already awake, although his eyes were shut, milking the last drops of sleep. Instead of leaving the coffee by his side and going her way, he suddenly heard her call out, her voice viperish, ‘Begone, chaatan. Get away from that window. Leave my surviving son alone.’

Daniel woke up with a start and said, ‘What is it, amma?’ She didn’t look at him but continued to glare furiously at the locked and shuttered window. She spoke fiercely once more. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. How dare you think you can enter this house of the Lord?’ Daniel leapt up, hastily secured his lungi and gently shook his mother, asking her what the matter was. She told him in a harsh, strained voice that there was a sinister little man, dressed all in black, squatting on the window-sill. Daniel looked to where she pointed but there was nothing. He led her muttering back to her room, unrolled her sleeping mat, and gave her a potion to sedate her. He told Lily to take over her chores for the day.

After the incident of the demon on the window-sill, Charity’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre. She would wander up to whoever was in the room and begin talking to them in a guttural voice of the huge evil she glimpsed behind their eyes and how it would need to be extinguished if the world were to be a better place. At other times she would address the person nearest her as Aaron and begin weeping and asking for forgiveness for being such a heartless mother. Lily began to fear for the children’s welfare and would never leave them alone in their grandmother’s presence, although Charity showed no signs of violence. Her hair, still black in late middle age, started turning white.

Daniel became seriously concerned when she took to going out in the evening, as the lamplighters began to light up the town, to accost strangers and warn them of the hell-fire and plague that would consume them if they did not give up their sinful ways. He began treating her the siddha way, pooling oil on her head to cool her fevered mind, making her inhale the vapours of herbs, massaging her with therapeutic oils. When none of these seemed to help, he reluctantly agreed to follow the advice of Lily and the padre of the Home Church (who had prayed without any discernible result over Charity for weeks) that he should take his mother to the church in Ranivoor town, a day’s journey to the northwest.

Charity didn’t protest when Daniel announced they were going on a trip. Two days later, they were in a jutka whirring along a narrow road that ran like the spine of an open book through fields of emerald rice. Eventually they arrived at their destination, St Luke’s Church, whose patron saint was famous throughout the district for his success in curing people possessed by spirits. The church proper was a little outside the busy town of Ranivoor, the second biggest in the district. Their route took them past the crowded main bazaar, a scattering of imposing government buildings and the squat, forbidding Sub-jail. A little further on, the crush of buildings thinned out and soon they were on the outskirts of the town. St Luke’s loomed up before them.

A small settlement, two rows of houses and shops, had grown up around the massive building. Makeshift kiosks sold rosaries, crucifixes, pictures of a pink-faced St Luke, rings, amulets, chains, roasted peanuts and gram. The streets were filled with the families of those who had come to seek the help of the saint. Every community was represented – caste Hindus, and those beyond the pale of caste, Muslims, Christians – and every slice of society: poor labourers and farmers mingled with landlords and townspeople dressed in expensive cottons and silks. Finding lodgings in one of the houses that catered to travellers, Daniel settled Charity in and ventured out in search of food and provisions.

Near one of the shops, he heard a clanking behind him, and looked around to see a man of medium height with frizzy hair walking along the road, his eyes wide and staring. He was conservatively dressed, but wore no shoes. With a peculiar thrill, Daniel realized that his ankles were bound together with two crude hoops of steel. There didn’t seem to be anyone minding him, and after staring vacantly at Daniel for a while, the madman shuffled off, his dragging gait raising little puffs of dust. Now Daniel began to notice that a fair proportion of the crowd possessed an empty gaze. Many seemed to have been left to wander by themselves as their families took a break. He presumed these were harmless lunatics. The townspeople were obviously used to having them around. Making inquiries, he learned that the exorcisms would begin in the evening, after a special church service.

The brief evening service, a daily affair, was conducted with the minimum of ceremony and ritual. The priest, a harassed-looking man, with exophthalmic eyes and an unruly beard, made a practised sermon, obviously one he had been delivering for years, on Jesus casting out devils. Drawn from Luke, the text centred on the madman whom the Son of God encountered in the country of the Gadarenes.

The priest talked about Christ’s numerous encounters with the many forms of Satan. He cited the power Christ gave to his seventy disciples:

His voice grew animated.

He blessed the congregation and retreated swiftly.

When they filed out of the church, volunteers funnelled the crowds into an open area around a pillared hall, roofed, but without walls. On the floor was a thick layer of sand. The hall abutted a grotto that had a terracotta statue of St Luke painted in garish colours. The statue of the saint was protected by an iron portcullis. A steady stream of devotees filed past the likeness. Every inch of space around the pillared hall was packed with people, a large proportion of them villagers dressed in lungis and cheap saris, out for an evening’s entertainment. Peanut vendors hawked their wares, skilfully wending their way through the patient crowd. A few torches flickered dully here and there, scarcely illuminating those closest to them. In contrast, the pillared hall blazed with the light of dozens of lanterns like a spotlit stage on which the actors would presently arrive.