The House of Blue Mangoes (5 page)

If he wanted his road, Dipty Vedhar had to somehow break down resistance. He had summoned representatives from the major caste groups – the tiny Brahmin community (there were only three Brahmin families in the village, hereditary keepers of the Murugan temple), the Andavars and the Vedhars – to a meeting. The Paraiyans, as always, were excluded. The first conclave ended in a shouting match and a second was convened. This too proved inconclusive. More meetings followed. Deliberations dragged on for eight months and still nobody could agree on how the road should be laid. For once, Solomon was completely stymied. He could not support Dipty Vedhar without offending his fellow villagers. But nor did he want to be seen to be obstructing the deputy tahsildar. In the end, hugely frustrated, Dipty Vedhar called the whole thing off. Six months later, he exhumed the proposal once more, on account of an event that had taken place decades earlier, half a world away.

The American Civil War had interrupted the flow of cotton to Lancashire because much of the strife was centred on the cotton plantations in the South. But it is one of the conditions of mass manufacture that machines can never be kept idle. If cotton from America could not be had, it had to come from somewhere else. About that time, a shipment of Indian cotton, from Tinnevelly, found its way to England. ‘Tinnie’ cotton, as it was known, was of exceptionally good quality. Suddenly the impoverished cotton-growing areas in the south – Tinnevelly, Kilanad, Virudhunagar and the Andhra country – began generating vast amounts of revenue and fortunes were made. The ending of the Civil War and the resumption of the American cotton trade did not end the importance of tinnie cotton. It continued to be in demand in England and locally.

One of the principal cotton-growing areas in Kilanad district lay far north of the Chevathar river. The cotton was transported to Chevathar, where it was weighed, measured and sorted, and then taken across to Meenakshikoil, on the heads of coolies, to be sold. Just when Dipty Vedhar had finally decided to shelve the new road, the district authorities secured a large order for cotton. Along with other local officials, the deputy tahsildar was instructed to procure supplies of the crop speedily. He explained to Solomon that construction of the road and culvert would need to begin before the rainy season started. They both knew that this time there could be no backing down.

After days of consultation, Solomon visited Dipty Vedhar with a compromise. The road would pass through the Vedhar quarter, and also skirt Vakeel Perumal’s house and the Murugan temple, thereby assuaging the egos of the higher castes. But as this was a government road, members of every caste would have the right to use it, and it was up to him as thalaivar to ensure that as far as possible caste rules were not broken. It wasn’t the perfect solution but it was the best he could come up with. There was really no way around it.

Now, as he walked home from his meeting with the deputy tahsildar, Solomon mulled over the various problems created by the new road. All through the summer of its construction he had felt a sense of foreboding. Once it was laid, he’d thought, nothing would be the same again. And he had been right. Within a year of its inauguration, there were at least a couple of incidents directly linked to the road.

Soon after it was finished, during the Pongal festival, a group of young girls had been molested by drunken youths who had crossed the bridge and wandered into the village. The rowdies had been thrashed by the villagers but there had been no end to the recriminations showered upon Solomon and the deputy tahsildar. Four months later, a Paraiyan had been beaten almost to death by some Vedhar men for daring to stroll through their quarter, blithely smoking a beedi, with his turban firmly on his head rather than around his waist as was customary in the presence of the higher castes. The Paraiyans had come in a body to Solomon to plead for justice. They repeated his own words to him: the road was a government road and therefore had no caste restrictions placed on it. A man was free to walk on it as he pleased. They had, of course, no intention of causing trouble, they owed their lives and everything else to their masters, but this was unfair. Solomon had received the deputation with disfavour. He thought the Paraiyan had gone too far. But he knew he could take only one decision. He ruled that everyone could use the government road without hindrance, though the polluting classes would have to comply with the rules as far as possible – their shadows could not fall on the upper castes, they would continue to take off their turbans in the presence of their superior caste fellows, they should not approach villagers of the highest caste closer than thirty-two paces, and their lungis should always be folded above the knee. There was surprisingly little objection to Solomon’s ruling and thereafter the road was freely used.

But although he had stood firm and the storm had passed, Solomon Dorai knew that the trouble wouldn’t end there. He had lived on this land all his life, as his family had for generations before him, and he respected its customs and traditions. Although thirty-four of the eighty-seven families who made the village their home were, like him, Christian Andavars, he had never tried to impose the Christian way on the Hindu villagers, whether they were Brahmin, Andavar, Vedhar or lower caste. He donated generously to the Murugan temple but never tried to enter its precincts, in keeping with caste strictures, and when he gave food to the Brahmin priests during festivals he was careful to ensure that it was uncooked, for it was proscribed to give cooked food to superior castes. He was aware that not everyone shared his strong belief in tradition. But he had always kept Chevathar (and the other villages he owned) free of caste conflict. Until the coming of the road had unsettled the existing order.

Only eight days ago, on Ram Navami day, there had been a scuffle at the Murugan temple, when two Andavar men had been caught trying to enter. Solomon had ruled against the Andavars. He had argued long and hard in defence of his ruling and pointed out that the Andavars had their own temple, the Ammankoil, and that there was no profit in fighting with the Vedhars to gain entry to the Murugan temple. In the end, the Andavar elders had no option but to agree, especially as the majority of them were tenant farmers on his estate. Solomon’s most vociferous opponent, Muthu Vedhar, the leader of the Vedhar group, had also been neutralized by his tough and forthright action.

A great flapping in the stand of tamarind trees he was passing interrupted Solomon’s thoughts. He looked up to see a large handsome bird, its plumage rusty red on white, lifting clumsily up from the branch of the tree on which it was perched. Once it was in the air, its movements steadied, grew more graceful. He remembered what the padre of the local church, an amateur ornithologist, had called the bird when they’d encountered it on one of their walks. Father Ashworth had joked that even the birds were sucked into the caste structure with this, the most striking raptor, called the Brahminy kite, and the most dowdy, the Pariah kite. The priest was right, he thought, caste had permeated every aspect of their lives.

He watched the kite drifting along the thermals and wondered how the village looked from way up there. The great palm groves, Charity’s unusual trees, the huts, the river, the bridge . . . As it soared even higher, the immediate detail of the village would begin to soften and something else, not immediately apparent, would come into view: a fine mesh of lines incising the ancient earth of the village, several little paths that began and ended for no reason or wandered erratically across the place. Some of them had been worn into the soil by the boys who herded cows, goats, buffaloes and other livestock. But Solomon understood the significance of the other paths. These conformed to the rules of pollution and caste. For example, the path from the Paraiyans’ quarter, the cheri, began at the southernmost point of the village and ran in a great arc around it, before ending at the bridge. In practical terms, it simply meant that an inhabitant of the cheri would have to walk nearly twice the distance that a Brahmin would, in order to cross the village. Similar rules governed the siting of houses, areas earmarked for defecation and bathing, access to the river and cropland. The highest castes got the best, and the inhabitants of the cheri at the lowest point downstream, before the river turned to salt, got the worst. That’s the way things were and for all its beauty and deceptive serenity, Chevathar, like any other village in the area, was rigidly ordered by caste strictures and traditions that hadn’t changed for as long as anyone could remember. Until the road, the accursed road, had come along and upset the balance.

When he entered the courtyard of his house, a flock of doves, brown as the earth, whirred to the ground and began scratching for food. A Rajapalaiyam, its long face alight with anticipation, charged the birds and they flew up in alarm. The dog raced away. In time, Solomon thought, the road would be assimilated into the timeless rhythm of the village, as had every other new influence and idea over the centuries. But acceptance of it would not be easy. Everything that abraded the established order released anguish and pain before the healing process began. And it was up to people like him to manage the change in the best possible way. God give me the strength to do that, he muttered, as he irritably scratched the stubble on his chin.

7

St Paul’s Church was a pentangular building, roofed with cherry-red country tiles, now dark and shadowed by age, its walls glowing with the brilliant white of limewash. Three other buildings stood within the mission compound: a school, a small dispensary and the parsonage, all hidden by ancient palms. Only the steeple of the church towered above the trees, in keeping with the biblical injunction that no house of God be lower than its surroundings or the dwellings of the faithful. The church had been rebuilt twice, once when it had been partially destroyed by fire in 1837 and again, after a sudden cyclonic storm, thirty years later. But its essential architecture had remained unchanged. On the outside, it looked no different to other missionary-built churches in the area, but its interior was unique.

Some months after the 1837 fire, while the church was being repaired, fifteen villagers from the Paraiyan caste had converted to Christianity. Solomon Dorai’s grandfather, who was thalaivar at the time, had been adamant that the new converts could not be allowed to worship in the church. The pastor, a thrawn Scot, had insisted otherwise. Matters were coming to a head when the headman proposed a solution. In order that the priest did not even inadvertently favour his lower-caste flock, the headman proposed that a hollow wall be constructed from the doorway of the church to the altar rail. The priest would walk through the wall and emerge before his congregation (the worshippers of the Andavar caste sat on the more favoured right of the church) to conduct the service. Separate communion tables and chalices would ensure that Andavar and Paraiyan didn’t drink from the same cup or eat of the same bread. Neither group had set eyes on the other in all the years that they had worshipped together, for the lower castes left the church immediately after the service through a door set into their side of the building.

Over the next sixty-two years, all the priests of the Chevathar mission had tried to dismantle the offending wall, without success. The present rector had often thought it a pity that Solomon, that most fair-minded of men, should refuse to take down the wall. Arguments that Christianity did not admit of caste were routinely ignored and after some years of trying, Father Ashworth gave up.

The Reverend Paul Ashworth was a short man, comfortably proportioned, with a few threads of greying hair straying across his otherwise bald head. His eyes seemed almost too blue for his face, which was burnt a dark red by the sun. Today his face was more flushed than usual for he had spent the morning wandering along the beach with Daniel, the thalaivar’s older son.

Father Ashworth enjoyed the boy’s company, and whenever they could find the time, Daniel and he would set off on some small adventure, either prospecting along the shore for rare shells and sea creatures or making forays into the coconut and acacia forests looking for herbs and exotic plants. They were both interested in the therapeutic properties of plants, and they would often take specimens to the vaidyan to find out what their healing properties were.

Usually, they ventured out quite early but this morning the sun was well up in the sky and the day was already hot by the time they got to the seashore. However, the allure of the tide pools was too strong and they had begun walking along the shore, the thunder of the sea filling their ears, stopping at every rocky indentation to probe and tease out the treasures that lay beneath the clear water. In an hour or so they had amassed quite a haul. Then Father Ashworth found a rare wentletrap, a large ribbed and whorled shell that they had never come across before. As if to compensate, Daniel made the next finds – a glittering red-and-gold marvel, shaped like a sultan’s turban, and a pair of purple sea snails with carapaces of the palest lavender. Galvanized by these finds, they had begun searching the pools with renewed intensity, unearthing fantastically carved murex shells, periwinkles, speckled and ribbed in crazy undulating patterns, exquisite strawberry conches, sundials with complex spirals on their shells, and their favourites, the beautiful cowries that had been used as currency in the country about a thousand years before. Even by their standards, their haul was impressive: in addition to the common tiger cowrie, Father Ashworth found a rare Isabelle cowrie, glistening like a highly polished ear stud, and Daniel snagged a mole cowrie with cream and brown bands as well as an unusually coloured sieve cowrie with reddish instead of cream spots. A wave broke and receded, and Father Ashworth’s eyes had widened.

‘Money cowries. Dozens of them, we’re rich,’ he’d yelled.

‘Now I can go to Melur and become a doctor. You can send me,’ Daniel had yelled back, above the thudding of the sea.

‘I wish I could, Daniel, I wish I could,’ the priest had said to himself as they bent to gather up their trove.