The House of Blue Mangoes (49 page)

But it was the advent of the flotillas of Englishwomen that confirmed the trend. Where some of the men were still prepared to seek out and understand the locals to some degree, providing both sides with the opportunity to build trust and occasionally friendship and admiration, the memsahib would not venture beyond her bungalow. Ill-prepared for the chaos and vastness of India, isolated by her lack of language, she could thrive only by rigorously excluding the enormous country at her doorstep, and this she did. Her bungalow was furnished just the way she might kit out a villa in Sevenoaks, her gardens drooped with pallid English flowers, and as she gradually drew her husband into this ersatz English world, it was only a matter of time before the handful of Britons in India began to lose the organic connection to the land. Soon they were burrs precariously clinging to the skin of India, that would be shaken off the minute there was a violent upheaval. Rare was the Englishwoman who was truly at home in India beyond the stockade, and Mrs Stevenson was no exception.

Matilda Stevenson would have been astonished if anyone had charged her with not knowing enough about India or Indians. She considered India home, even though she constantly grumbled about not seeing enough of England, and she believed she was genuinely fond of Indians. She relied hugely on her butler Madaswamy, and couldn’t imagine life without him. But without her, as she constantly reminded him, he would be nothing, less than nothing. It was only because of her patronage and training that he had blossomed – to the point where he was solely in charge of the thirty-seven servants who ensured that the General Manager’s Bungalow was always in good working order. Madaswamy, Velu the head gardener, Mani the driver, every one of them was an integral part of Mrs Stevenson’s world. She showered kindness upon them, sending their children English toffees and small gifts at Christmas and Easter, in addition to the usual baksheesh, and she even allowed Madaswamy to do his share of skimming from the shopping and household accounts. No, Mrs Stevenson knew her Indians. But she would have been the first to admit that good Indians were Indians who knew their places. Mrs Stevenson had never met a maharani but she wouldn’t have been fazed if she had. As the wife of the General Manager of Pulimed Tea Company, and as an Englishwoman, she was superior to any Indian.

Mrs Stevenson was deeply shaken when her husband hired Kannan Dorai. She would, of course, have never dreamed of telling him how to run his company, although she did it all the time, subtly and persuasively. But she hadn’t seen this coming. It wasn’t surprising, for she had no sense of history. She didn’t read the Indian newspapers (and scanned only the society snippets in British-owned ones), in common with most of the Englishwomen in Pulimed, nor did she listen to the talk of her husband and his colleagues, except when it had to do with things that interested her such as promotions, demotions and marital discord. No Indians appeared on her horizon, save the staff, and when the trickle of London papers stopped on account of the war, she was completely cut off from the outside world.

As a result, she was unprepared when her husband began to usher in the sort of change she could not countenance. What could he have been thinking of when he had hired a native as a replacement for Joe Wilson? Of all people! Joe Wilson, her favourite. Joe Wilson, now fighting for country and for Empire. Joe Wilson, Old Etonian, marksman extraordinaire, a Cambridge blue in tennis, who let others win so skilfully that they never knew he controlled every point from the moment he arced back to serve. Joe Wilson’s place taken by a native! By her own hand, no less, because Mrs Stevenson regarded her husband as merely an extension of herself. It was all too much to take. And what did it portend?

Mrs Stevenson’s power in Pulimed had never been questioned in all the time she had ruled. Dining out required tails, boiled shirt, white waistcoat, stiff collar and white tie, twenty years after it had died out everywhere else in India – and only because Mrs Stevenson had so decreed. She knew
Mrs Beeton’s Cookery and Household Management
, as she did Debrett’s
Peerage
and the various other rule books that governed society. She watched people’s accents, was keen to discover their pedigree, and never failed to detect vulgar blood lurking behind the most refined exterior. No one willingly crossed her, for there was only one possible outcome.

But Kannan Dorai disturbed her more than she cared to admit. He was properly respectful and seemed acceptable enough for an Indian. But was he a precursor of things to come? Some nights Mrs Stevenson would lie awake, visions of a suburban villa in a dreary English town (such as Grantham), dancing in her head. She would shake the thought aside, but the unease remained. And now Kannan had shaken her composure again, by marrying a mixed blood. Someone who was completely beyond the pale. As the General Manager’s wife, she was expected to be civil to the newcomer, and suitably dignified in the way she treated her. But it filled her with unease. She had always prided herself on being completely in control but these new developments had thrown her off-balance. However, this was only temporary, she vowed grimly; she knew exactly how to deal with them.

79

One morning, Kannan was in a self-congratulatory mood as he drove to the field. I’ve done things that I scarcely presumed I could, he reflected. I’ve imagined and reinvented my life in ways that I’d never have believed possible. I defied my father, went out into the world and made something of myself in a place that a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have considered breaking into, no matter how highly I regarded myself. I’ve even managed to check my temper. I’m no longer callow and impetuous.

His thoughts turned to Helen, and here again there was cause for wonderment. He doubted that any Dorai he knew could have contemplated romance with a woman, let alone treated her as an equal. There had been moments when he’d doubted his own ability to do so, but he’d adapted, curbing his instinctual response to be dismissive and superior in order to cherish and adore his wife.

Feeling very pleased with himself he reached the field, where his supervisor presented him with an unusual gift. One of the pluckers had disturbed a hare and it had taken off, leaving behind a pair of leverets. These were given to Kannan. They looked pretty ugly, but he thought they would make the perfect present for Helen. For about a month or so now he had tried to take her some small surprise when he returned from work – a bunch of wild daisies, a lock of maidenhair fern, an interesting pebble that shone like gold. In the first flush of love the offering had always worked, but lately, he had begun to feel the need to get her something out of the ordinary.

Helen was overjoyed with the gift. She fussed over the ugly little babies and made a tiny bed for them out of cotton waste and straw that she placed on her bedside table. She soaked cotton wrapped around a matchstick in cow’s milk and tried to feed them, but they refused every blandishment, and died two days later. Helen was inconsolable and wept loudly when they buried the tiny bodies under the camellia bush in the front garden.

She bounced back soon enough, and that Saturday took Kannan round the dance floor quite expertly. It was the first time he had danced at the club, and after his initial trepidation he began to enjoy himself. A waltz and a foxtrot, and his repertoire was exhausted, but he was so pleased with his performance that after the second dance, when Freddie asked her for the next one, he released her with only the merest twinge of jealousy. As he walked back to his seat, he chanced to meet Mrs Stevenson’s eye. Her gaze was cold, but he smiled happily at her, and then moved on, out of her field of vision.

A new job, a new marriage, a fresh lick of paint on a peeling surface – in none of these does it take very long for fault lines to show. The first cracks in their idyll appeared on the day Kannan took Helen to the factory.

In April, life on the estates speeded up, as the finest harvest to be had all year, the first flush, was gathered in. Factories operated round the clock; managers, pluckers and labourers worked themselves to the bone, for this was the time of year that maximum profits were to be made. One Sunday, Kannan skipped church to do factory duty. The Glenclare factory had been shut for two days due to a breakdown of machinery, and to make up for lost time, Michael had decided the factory would work through the weekend.

Kannan woke up early as usual and watched a chink of grey light through the drawn curtains. By his side Helen slept on. He looked at her appreciatively. How defenceless she seems when she’s asleep, he thought. Then he slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her. As he dressed, he wondered what he could do to make up for the previous night when he had begged off going to the club. He’d sensed her disappointment, although she hadn’t protested. Now he’d be away for much of the morning, when they could have gone on a picnic, as they sometimes did on Sundays when the weather was good. As he finished shaving, an idea struck him. It seemed so excellent that he didn’t know why it had never occurred to him before.

He took in her morning tray himself. By her teacup lay two sprigs of tea – the famous two leaves and a bud that are picked when tea is ‘fine’-harvested. He kissed her and hovered around as she slowly came awake. He watched her examine the tea-leaves on the tray in some puzzlement and then said lightly, ‘I’ve got a wonderful surprise for you, Lady of My Life.’

‘And what might that be?’ she asked sleepily.

‘It just occurred to me that I’ve shown you everything about my life here – tennis parties, dance nights at the club, dinners at my colleagues’ bungalows, every nook and corner of the estate – except for one thing. How those leaves by your plate become the tea in your cup. Today, my love, we’re going to the factory.’

She looked at him as if he were mad, not sure that she had heard correctly. Was her husband really proposing to take her to that huge tin-roofed barn that they had passed dozens of times on their way elsewhere but had never actually entered? She didn’t have the slightest interest in visiting it; there were some things in life you knew you had no use for. But in the face of Kannan’s enthusiasm she gave in. He was slightly deflated by her lack of excitement, but put it down to the fact that she was half asleep. She would be fascinated by what she was about to see, he was sure of that. Especially as so few planters’ wives had actually seen a tea factory in operation. If he had been somewhat less overwhelmed by his own genius he might have had cause to wonder why not.

A message was dispatched to the tea-maker and Kannan roared off on his motorcycle to ask Michael’s permission to take his wife to the factory. When they arrived, the tea-maker, a middle-aged man with discoloured teeth, was waiting for them at the factory entrance. Inside, the air was scented with tea, and they were assailed by the continuous clatter of machinery. Kannan and the tea-maker held a shouted conversation, and then he smiled and pointed to a rickety ladder that disappeared into the upper reaches of the factory. They skirted piles of tea and thundering machines and a number of men clad only in dirty khaki shorts and singlets, who paused in their work to stare silently at Helen before the tea-maker gestured them back to work. Up the ladder they went, the tea-maker first, followed by Helen and Kannan. In the withering loft it was quieter, but warm. In long troughs with wire-mesh bottoms, freshly plucked tea-leaves were spread thickly. Kannan took a couple of the leaf stalks that lay in a trough and passed them to his wife. ‘Remember that day when the pluckers were working in the field next to the bungalow? You said the sound they made while they worked was like cows munching grass?’

Helen did remember. The women who plucked the tea had seemed as delicate and colourful as butterflies. She had walked out on to the lawn, and they had pointed to her and giggled and made remarks about her that she couldn’t make out. A supervisor had walked up to them, and they had resumed plucking.

‘This is what they pluck,’ he said. ‘When they pluck fine, they take the tip of the stalk, the bud, and the two leaves beneath it, but most of the time they pluck coarse, the bud plus three or four leaves. We get more cuppage that way.’

They started back the way they had come, Kannan still explaining the mysteries of the manufacturing of tea. ‘The tea-plant is one of the most obliging cash crops known to man,’ he said proudly. ‘It virtually does all the work when it comes to converting itself from the leaf on the bush to the tea we drink; all we do is help it along.’ He explained the five stages in the manufacturing process, of which withering was the first. Hot air was passed through the leaves, as a result of which they lost their moisture; the effect of the heat catalysed the first of several internal chemical reactions.

He showed Helen where the leaves were sent down a chute to the rolling room, the noisiest section of the factory. Here, among the thunder of iron Britannia machines that stood as tall as her, Kannan shouted that the leaves were rolled until their cell walls shattered and the oils within rose to the surface. The rolled leaves were placed in a dark room in which they began to ferment, following which they were taken to another section of the factory and put into a huge machine that dried them by passing a current of superheated air over them. Firing done, the tea was now ready to be sorted into various grades that would then be packed into crates and shipped out of the factory.

He stopped and picked up a handful of tea, black and intensely aromatic, from one of the piles in the sorting section and held it out to her. ‘Just smell this, nothing can match the aroma of freshly manufactured tea.’ Helen gave him a wan smile, and sniffed. It smelt like tea. She let it dribble away and waited for Kannan to finish talking to the tea-maker. Her enthusiasm, already at a low ebb by the time they had reached the factory, had dwindled all through the tour and now all she wanted to do was go home. But Kannan wasn’t finished. ‘Come on, Hen, Shankar here has got everything ready for the tea-tasting.’

Helen didn’t know what a tea-tasting was, but she was sure she wanted to go home. ‘I’d like to go home now, if that’s all right,’ she said quietly.