The House of Blue Mangoes (34 page)

The next morning he was up early, the sounds of the dawn renewing in him the feeling that he was finally home. He walked to the mission compound and was saddened to see the blackened ruins of the church. In the cemetery, he spent a long time by the graves of his father and Father Ashworth. He thought about nothing, just letting his senses flow with the crackling of the breeze in the coconut palms and the deep thudding of the sea on the deserted beach. Memories swirled in, the episodes of family history most deeply etched in his mind rose up, and he allowed them to take him over . . . When he finally rose to go, he was exhausted from experiencing afresh the tragedies and triumphs of the Dorais. But it had been a necessary act of remembering, for it had helped him make up his mind. He now knew without a doubt what he had to do next.

52

Daniel Dorai was thirty-five years old, and one of the richest men in Nagercoil, when he decided to re-establish himself on his ancestral soil. His family, with the exception of Charity who was neither for nor against the idea, was alarmed by his new obsession. When Lily and Ramdoss, his brother-in-law, taxed him with it, all he would say was, ‘Chevathar has always had a Dorai. With my father and my brother gone, it’s time I returned. I’ve become a stranger in my own land and I would like to get to know it again.’ They tried everything they could to change his mind, but he wouldn’t budge and so they left him alone, hoping that pressure of work would eventually divert him from his course.

It was not to be. Although it would be years before Daniel finally returned to Chevathar, he stuck to his resolve. Meanwhile, there were more pressing demands on his time. He had to keep an eye on the business, which was expanding at a furious rate; there were the usual importunate relatives and friends whose demands had to be dealt with tactfully; the children, both his own and Rachel’s, had to be looked after; and finally there was Miriam to be settled.

His pampered sister had painfully dragged her way through a Home Science degree, never once losing the opportunity to tell whoever would listen to her that her life was being ruined. If she grew to be an old maid, she would know exactly who to blame. During the family’s difficult days she’d had the good sense to behave herself and once the year of mourning for Aaron was over, Daniel set about arranging her marriage. He had worried that Charity wouldn’t involve herself but although his mother didn’t take on the entire responsibility, as she would have done in the past, she began to show an interest. After sifting through scores of proposals, for there was no dearth of parents willing to give their sons in marriage to Dr Dorai’s sister, Charity and Daniel settled on a young advocate in preference to the scions of landowning families. Arul’s family was prosperous, but Daniel was impressed with the young man’s determination to build a career. He married his sister off with a rich man’s pomp. The celebrations lasted nearly a month and the bride’s dowry included, in addition to the traditional gifts and money, a brand-new Ford Model T Raceabout.

But despite the myriad duties that occupied him in Nagercoil, Daniel would often drive to Chevathar. In a couple of years, the stately progress of his latest acquisition, a laburnum-yellow Oldsmobile, through the dusty streets of the village was no longer remarked upon. On these trips he was always accompanied by Ramdoss, and by a distant cousin of Charity’s called Santosham who had helped him build the factory where his patent medicines were manufactured. The three men would patiently seek out the dozens of smallholders who owned property in and around Chevathar and negotiate to buy their land. Usually, the farmers were only too willing to sell, for Dr Dorai offered almost double the market rate. Often the lands acquired had once belonged to Solomon. The acres slowly added up. By the end of 1918, Daniel owned four hundred and twenty-seven acres in Chevathar and Meenakshikoil.

On New Year’s Day 1919, he wrote to the head of every family in the Dorai clan. One hundred and twenty-three letters were dispatched, outlining a simple proposition. He wanted to start a family settlement in Chevathar. He was willing to give each invitee to the scheme an acre of land (those who wanted more could have it, subject to availability) at a fifth of the market rate. The only condition was that they settle in Chevathar for, at the very minimum, their own lifetimes. And if their heirs wanted to resell, they could only do so to the family. After repeated reminders, he received eighty-eight positive replies. Some of the others thought it was a hoax, some had died and the rest were not interested. There were questions, clarifications, a veritable mountain of detail, but infused with the zeal of a new convert to a cause, Dr Dorai patiently resolved every problem that was thrown up.

He began to make the necessary arrangements. He hired assistants to run the Nagercoil clinic and factory, and set a date for the move two years in the future, 27 September, Aaron’s birthday. On his next trip to Chevathar he initiated work on his own house. He had decided it would be where the Big House stood. Modest by nature, Daniel Dorai decided that he would go against the grain and build the most magnificent building in the whole taluqa, perhaps even the district. ‘The glory of the Dorais has been eclipsed for far too long. I want to have a house that will last a hundred years and be a fitting testament to my father and brother,’ he declared to Santosham and Ramdoss. The only room that he would retain of the old structure would be the room his father had used.

53

The scraggly acacia tree at the edge of the marsh cast a scanty shade. Santosham had sat under it for over six months now, overseeing the efforts of a couple of hundred men who laboured from dawn to dusk on Daniel Dorai’s ‘thousand years’ house’, as it was known locally. He was a small cheerful man with a big shapeless nose and had been one of the first beneficiaries of Daniel’s new-found obsession with family. A failed engineering graduate with a flexible attitude to life, he had acquired a basic understanding of the building trade from a Nagercoil contractor. What Santosham did not know about floating pediments and poured concrete, he more than made up for with his capacity for hard work and ability to come up with unorthodox solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Daniel had been satisfied enough with the jobs Santosham had done for him, and had no misgivings about appointing him to build the house.

As soon as he had selected his site and his contractor, Daniel had visited Madras to pick his architect. He had interviewed twenty-three before settling on Colin Snow, a third-generation disciple of Mad Mant, the eccentric inventor in the mid-nineteenth century of the Indo-Saracenic style that fused Indian baroque with English common sense to produce a wondrous new hybrid. The only thing about Indo-Saracenic grandeur was that it required an enormous amount of money, and even Daniel’s considerable fortune would have been stretched. His architect and he decided to settle for something a little less opulent. They criss-crossed the city for a week before finally deciding on one of the grand garden houses on the banks of the Adyar river as a model for the Dorai home.

Putting down a deposit, Daniel had invited Snow to visit Chevathar as soon as he could. The architect had arrived in the village a few days later, to survey the site that had been chosen for the monumental edifice: seventeen acres of land by the river, including the spot on which the Big House had stood. The only problem was that over the years the Chevathar had altered its course and a fair amount of the land on which Snow was expected to build was marshy, home to a seething mass of mosquitoes. He had suggested finding another site but Daniel would have none of it. Nor would he consider a smaller building. His instructions to his architect were clear: enshrine within the edifice the unquenchable spirit of the Dorais and proclaim to the whole world the magnificence of the family.

Snow prided himself on his ability to incorporate elements of the surrounding environment into his design. But what could you do with a marsh?

The architect and the contractor debated the practicality of laying a pile foundation, still a relatively new concept in the building industry, but decided against it in the end. It would have meant bringing everything, with the exception of chunam and brick, by rail and cart from the district capital or even further afield. In the end, Santosham came up with a solution that displayed to best effect his native shrewdness: they would dig a series of shallow wells across the marsh into which channels would drain the water. Once emptied of the water, the wells would be filled with broken tiles, sand, pebbles and crushed stone, packed in tight, so they would be baked as hard as granite by the fierce Chevathar sun. On these, the foundation would be laid. Snow’s estimation of his colleague rose a hundredfold, for Santosham had just proposed doing what Scottish engineers had done a century earlier to drain the marsh on which the magnificent St Andrew’s Kirk now stood in Madras. When Snow mentioned this to him, Santosham looked at him blankly – he had never seen the great church, and he knew even less about how it had been built.

The work was slow and tedious, and seven months after he had begun, Santosham had dug only eighty shallow wells, just over half of what was needed. Daniel was growing impatient so he doubled his labour force to four hundred men, but it was hot, difficult, dirty work. The labourers, wearing only skimpy loincloths, worked half submerged in the water. As they dug deeper, the water would cover them completely; still they would dig, holding their breath for a short time, before surfacing, gasping and spluttering. As the months passed, the marsh remained resolutely soggy. Santosham despaired often. And then, all at once, in the ninth month, dry land surfaced, and then spread rapidly.

The chattering of sparrows, mynahs and crows was drowned by a new sound – the tick-tick-tick of hundreds of crude hammers as the women on the workforce began the arduous task of breaking down boulders into piles of tiny chips that would be used in the construction. Smoke poured from brick kilns and every day bullock carts creaked in, bearing all manner of building materials.

Once the foundation was laid, the walls of the mansion rose rapidly. And then, during one of Daniel’s lightning visits to Chevathar, he fell out with his architect. He had recently visited the nearby princely state of Mysore and had been very taken with the intricate bargeboards and canopies that rose like pointed hoods over the windows and doors of the palatial bungalows he had seen. He wanted Snow to incorporate these distinctive monkey tops into his design, but the Englishman, who loved the lines of his building, refused.

‘Dr Dorai, you must understand that while this is your house, and you are paying for it, I have to be in complete charge of the model you approved, or it simply won’t work. If you want a great house, you must let me do things my way.’

Daniel looked at the architect reflectively, then said, ‘I thank you for the trouble you have taken, but this is my house and I will have things done my way. That is the only way it will work.’ Snow left the same day, cursing his client, his temper somewhat soothed by the generous severance gift he had received.

To Santosham’s astonishment, he now found himself in charge of the whole project. Within days, his limitations showed. An enormous bedroom would rise, only for the contractor to discover that he had omitted to put in any windows. On one of Daniel’s periodic inspection trips, he walked around the building until he came to a halt under the imposing porte-cochère. He studied the frontage of the building for a long moment, the glistening columns of Pallavaram gneiss, the deep bay windows, and then turned and yelled at Santosham who had been following him nervously, ‘You donkey, you’ve spent a year and a half building this house and look what you’ve done!’

‘What, anna?’

‘You’ve forgotten to put in a front door.’

‘But we have always entered through the side door, anna!’

‘What would you like to do, idiot, turn the house around ninety degrees?’

‘No, anna, I’ll put in the door.’

‘Be sure you do, and I’m going to get you some help.’

Within a fortnight, another English architect arrived, this time from Mysore. Samuel Brown had built several bungalows with the distinctive monkey tops Daniel craved. The work speeded up.

Brown was charged with creating a suitable garden for the mansion. In a land where dust and rock predominated, he was determined that the building would float on a sea of green and riotous colour. He laid out a vast lawn; arbours of bougainvillea sprayed upward like pink and white surf, and climbing roses, yellow as egg yolk, punctuated the green. He planted a windbreak of casuarina, and created interesting features around the few ancient banyan, pipal and neem trees that had survived years of neglect. Some of the looming giants acquired anklets of hibiscus and croton, others shaded wrought-iron benches and tables. The red earth of Chevathar was mounded into gentle hillocks here and there, and decorated with seashells and flowering shrubs, sculptures and fountains.

Even before work on the house had begun, an army of gardeners got to work restoring the ancient mango groves. Grafting, pruning, layering, fertilizing and replanting, the new mansion soon had an elegant collar of Chevathar Neelams, two acres deep and several acres wide, following the contours of its semicircular back veranda and filling the grounds between the house and the river. In the centre of the front lawn, a great mango tree was carefully transplanted. The head gardener was given special charge of the tree, and warned, on pain of instant dismissal and worse, to keep the showpiece tree ever healthy, ever beautiful. He took his job seriously. Every second day, he had the hundreds of leaves on the tree washed by hand. The fruit, in season, would be buffed and polished, and two little boys from the village kept them from the attentions of squirrels and crows.

54

On the outskirts of Meenakshikoil, just before the shops began, was a large maidan of gritty red earth, scattered with tussocks of dried grass. One half of it was taken over by a school for its sports ground. Most days it would come alive with the ragged cries of schoolboys attempting to cope with the uneven bounce of their playing field as they pushed a hockey ball around.