The House of Blue Mangoes (37 page)

The formal tasting was only a part of the festivities. The mango groves echoed with laughter and excitement as the settlers and hundreds of visitors participated in mango-eating competitions and other feats of skill, endurance and frolic.

When the party finally concluded at two in the morning, queasy stomachs notwithstanding, it was declared a great success. ‘We must do this every year,’ Dr Dorai said to Ramdoss and Lily as he bid goodbye to the last guests. They received the news in silence, which Daniel chose to interpret positively.

57

Doraipuram continued to grow. New families poured in and by the end of the third year of its founding, the settlement was home to over a hundred and fifty people, some of whose links to the clan could best be described as tenuous. The brother-in-law of the husband of a third cousin, for example. There were retired airmen, geologists, doctors, engineers, accountants, clerks. Once in Doraipuram, they threw themselves into farming with a fervour that was commendable, except that their enthusiasm masked a woeful lack of experience. Rats ate their seed, crops withered, fruit rotted, and plants died due to excessive watering. Undeterred by this, the settlers hatched even more ambitious schemes. Cost was no consideration, for Daniel funded most of the projects.

An uncle, who had retired from practice as a dentist, decided to grow tulips, after having read about the craze for the flower in the seventeenth century when a single bulb could fetch more than a painting by Rembrandt. Half the expensive bulbs he imported from Holland were eaten by bandicoots, and most of the others did not sprout. Barely half a dozen shoots struggled out of the red earth, to wilt under the hot summer sun. Unfazed, the former dentist went the next evening to Neelam Illum, where Daniel parleyed daily with the elders of the settlement. He had a couple of new proposals to put forward: raising ostriches for meat and crocodiles for leather. Sitting in his cane easy chair, Daniel’s eyes gleamed with excitement. He liked both ideas and asked how much they would cost. The dentist was vague, but Ramdoss, who was present, was not. ‘Too much. It’ll cost too much,’ he said firmly.

Daniel said, ‘But they seem very promising. And very profitable.’

‘Like the tulips?’

Daniel looked annoyed. Nobody else would have dared contradict him in public, but Ramdoss had grown to be his most trusted friend and confidant.

‘The settlement is haemorrhaging money, and your funds are not inexhaustible,’ Ramdoss said, drawing Daniel aside.

‘My family is important, Ramu, I don’t care how much money they cost me. Besides, what are you complaining about? We’ve had three good monsoons in a row, sales of our products are booming, God is looking after us.’

‘God isn’t going to make tulips thrive in Doraipuram,’ Ramdoss said calmly. ‘He has more important things to worry about than the crazy schemes of the Dorais.’

Grumbling and fretting, Daniel allowed himself to be dissuaded. He put an end to the wilder schemes, and began to spend more time in his laboratory doing what he was good at – combining various herbs and metals and potions to come up with a new line of patent remedies. He had neglected his business for almost five years and although his whitening cream continued to sell well, Ramdoss’s concern had sprung in part from the fact that sales had flattened out. Now, within a year, Daniel launched five new products – a pimple cream, a tonic that boosted the body’s vitality, a depilatory salve, a headache remedy, and a cure for indigestion. Posters advertising the new products as well as the rest of the range were printed in Meenakshikoil, and displayed at railway stations and on the sides of bullock carts. Business began picking up again.

The colony didn’t stop consuming Dr Dorai’s fortune but now there was a reversal in the cash flow as Ramdoss’s prudence and Daniel’s skills as a pharmacist began taking effect.

With his growing wealth and fame, Daniel became a magnet for the importunate, the great and the good. Doraipuram was a mandatory stopover for visiting bureaucrats, elected officials (both British and Indian), holy men, aspiring politicians, who were politely reminded of their host’s aversion to politics, and minor royalty. Daniel was careful to keep the politicians and officials at a distance but his pride in his colony ensured that everyone who crossed the bridge over the Chevathar received a warm welcome. As the world came to him, Daniel rose to the pinnacle of his eminence.

There was another good monsoon that year. And the next. More families moved into Doraipuram.

58

Families thrive on gossip. It keeps the extended family connected and interested in the lives of its separate constituents. But it also has the potential to do great damage. One of the unexpected consequences of Daniel collecting his family together was the proliferation and concentration of gossip. In the past, whisperings about individuals were limited to the exchange of letters, rumours at family gatherings, weddings, births, funerals and visits. Sporadic and fleeting, it was handled easily enough. But now gossip grew to be a major problem. Almost half the families who had moved to the colony were over the age of fifty and had begun to look forward to retirement and the enjoyment of their grandchildren. Daniel’s offer had given the men a new lease of life, but the older women were left high and dry. In their home towns they would have presided over joint families that would have kept them busy, but here, more often than not, they lived alone with their husbands. Domestic help was plentiful and cheap, and they found themselves with time to spare. Gossip rushed in to fill the vacuum. Squabbles broke out between families, relatives stopped talking to each other, and Daniel’s glorious idea acquired a malicious core.

The queen of gossips was an enormously fat woman called Victoria. This particular aunt rapidly grew to be the most feared resident of Doraipuram, no mean achievement considering that, when they arrived in the colony, she and her husband were the butt of ridicule. Her husband, Karunakaran, was only obscurely related to the family. He had somehow found out about the project and had been swift to take advantage of his connection to the clan. Throwing up his job, he had arrived in Doraipuram with his wife and had almost immediately set about trying to make his presence felt. Desperate to impress, he had borrowed money from Daniel and bought a motorcycle. The only problem was that in his greed and haste, he hadn’t spent time learning how to drive the machine. To the vast amusement of the settlement, he had hired a mechanic from Meenakshikoil to drive for him part-time. Whenever the couple went to town, Karunakaran would ride pillion on the motorcycle, while his wife followed in a bullock cart.

But the chortling soon turned to dismay, as Victoria showed just how dangerous she could be. Every morning, after eating a huge breakfast, she would drag her bulk from house to house, scanty white hair in as much disarray as the shabby sari she wore, imbibing as much poisonous gossip as she could from every household, which she would then spill liberally wherever she went. Over time she gathered a clique of women around her, and they wrought havoc among the residents of Doraipuram. The men, absorbed in their eccentric pursuits, were oblivious of the danger, but the women felt it keenly.

One evening, as dinner was being prepared in the great kitchen of Neelam Illum, Lily astonished Charity by bursting into tears. Charity took her to her own room, and asked her what the matter was. It transpired that Victoria had told her neighbour, who had passed it on to a cousin who had in turn mentioned it to Miriam who urgently whispered to Lily after church, that Shanthi had been seen kissing the Mangalam boy in the mango tope nearest the estuary.

‘I thrashed Shanthi, mami, but she swore on Jesu, Mother Mary, her father and me that she had done no wrong. She’s a good girl, I know she’s telling the truth. It’s getting too much, this gossiping and viciousness. I can’t take it.’

‘Have you told your husband?’ Charity asked.

‘No, mami. He’s so busy, I feel it’s such a frivolous thing to bring to his attention.’

‘Not frivolous, not frivolous, this person could damage the whole colony and then where would our great experiment be?’ Charity said. She paused for some time, then said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. You tell Shanthi to behave herself and not to take notice of anything that’s said about her.’

A few days later, Charity cornered Lily in the backyard and said, ‘I’ve found the answer to our problem. Good works.’ When Lily looked mystified, she said, ‘These women have too much time on their hands. Let’s put them to work.’

Over the next months, Charity was a whirlwind of activity. Although she was in her sixties, and visibly worn down by the sorrows in her past, she seemed to be everywhere at once, chivvying aunts and grannies, cousins and nieces into a variety of tasks. One group was set to work teaching the labourers’ children how to read; another was put in charge of children under the age of four; and the padre was deluged with groups of women holding charity raffles and Bible sessions.

For months, Charity kept the women busy, until work in their own homes, which swelled as the colony grew and matured, sucked them in. The upkeep of their houses, hosting of visiting relatives, and community weddings, funerals, festivals and church functions took care of any time on their hands. Soon, most of the women couldn’t be bothered with Victoria. She would still drag herself from home to home, but her visits to her previous confidantes and co-conspirators were brief as they chafed to get on with their household chores. A few months later, even the familiar sight of her creeping progress through the colony ceased. She had grown so fat that her legs could no longer bear her weight. For a year or so she sat all day by the window while her husband roamed the colony, insinuating himself into the lives of others and gleaning food and information to share with his wife at home.

No longer the force she once was, Victoria even came to be pitied a little by the settlers. As for the few who still feared her, they soon had no more cause for concern when some months later her overworked heart, tired of pumping blood to her monstrous body, gave out.

Doraipuram had never witnessed a better funeral. All those who had dreaded her gave Victoria the grandest send-off she could have expected. On the sixteenth-day feast, Charity cooked her famous fish biryani, to Daniel’s extreme puzzlement. After her breakdown she’d cooked it less and less, reserving it only for the most special occasions.

59

One morning Daniel woke at dawn in a panic. Looking out of the window he saw a ghostly procession of figures, clad all in white, walking slowly through the thin mist that sometimes descended on the area. Convinced that something terrible was about to happen to his mother, who had dressed in white for nearly thirty years, he ran to her room shouting her name. When he couldn’t find her there he began looking frantically through the house before he finally thought to look in the kitchen. Charity was boiling milk on a stove.

‘Amma, are you all right?’ he asked worriedly.

‘Of course I am all right. Can’t you see for yourself? What’s the matter?’

‘Oh nothing, nothing,’ he said distractedly. The feeling of unease still hadn’t left him, so putting on his chappals and drawing a shawl around his shoulders, he set off in pursuit of the processionists. They were some distance ahead of him, but Daniel, walking fast, managed to catch up. He kept a hundred yards from them, and watched astonished as, softly chanting prayers and mantrams, they filed past the salt-works and meandered across the beach, towards the swelling ocean. Perhaps they were all going to kill themselves, he thought in a panic. He charged after them. ‘Stop, stop, I command you to stop. State your business.’ Unhurriedly, the processionists continued on their way. A few feet from the water’s edge, Daniel overtook them. ‘Didn’t you hear me shouting at you to stop?’ he asked. A couple of them seemed familiar, but the rest were strangers.

‘Only one agent of the Government,’ an old woman said. ‘Have you come to arrest us?’

Daniel looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘Arrest?’ he spluttered.

‘No, he’s not the Government, that’s Daniel Dorai, the big doctor aiyah,’ one of the familiar figures murmured.

‘In that case, let’s proceed with our mission,’ the leader of the group said. As one, they moved to the water’s edge, knelt and scraped up some of the salt-encrusted sand. Offering up a short prayer, they started back.

‘Have you gone mad?’ Daniel shouted, as he walked back up the beach with the procession. The leader, a youngish man clad only in a loincloth, and grasping a thick black staff, looked at him with luminous eyes. ‘No, anna, we’re not mad. All we’re doing is following our sacred duty as laid down by the Mahatma. He is breaking the oppressive salt law of the British thousands of miles to the west, just as our elder brother Rajaji is doing at Vedaranyam. Would you like to make some salt as well?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Daniel said indignantly. ‘What protest are you talking about?’

‘The Mahatma’s latest, anna,’ the leader said gently, and he resumed his steady progress. Daniel watched them go, mystified. As always, he’d missed this latest development, especially as Ramdoss was away. He must go and visit Narasimhan and find out what was going on.

The next afternoon he visited his friend the tahsildar in Meenakshikoil.

‘Oh yes, I’ve had to arrest them all for breaking the law. Government orders. But I must say that was a very clever move, very clever indeed. It was probably a bad idea for the Government to tax salt, it affects too many people, but what Mr Gandhi conveniently forgot to mention when he launched his agitation was that most other duties have been abolished. But he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s all there in the paper. See for yourself,’ Narasimhan said, handing Daniel copies of the
Mail
and the
Hindu
. He rapidly skimmed the reports which talked of the Mahatma’s great twenty-five-day march from Ahmedabad to the little seashore village of Dandi. On 6 April 1930, the Mahatma and his followers had walked to the seashore to make salt. Wrote the
Hindu
’s special correspondent: