They were at the shop now but the men barred their way. Aaron vaguely recognized a couple of them. Fishermen from the next village, bound to be savage fighters. He felt a twinge of apprehension. He was about to push past them when he heard Swami’s voice from within the shop. ‘I don’t want any trouble, Aaron-thambi, I’m a man of peace, and I have nothing but respect for the Dorais. Your father Solomon was a great man.’
‘And you’re nothing but dung, Swami.’
A crowd had begun gathering, sensing a fight. A crow cawed, a dusty sound on that hot day. Aaron looked around. Nambi had started backing away.
‘Thambi, don’t do this, we should live in peace . . .’
‘No, we won’t . . .’ Aaron screamed, driving at the man nearest to him. The man sidestepped adroitly and the rest were upon him, ferociously punching and swinging. He went down, and kicks and blows began thudding into his body.
Aaron lay in bed for eight days. The moment he was able to hobble, he left the house. The first day, his aching body could carry him only as far as the veranda, but soon he was taking short walks into the coconut topes. He never went in the direction of town.
About a month after he had been beaten up, Aaron went down to the beach. The air wobbled in the white heat of day, and the distant fishing boats could scarcely be distinguished in the hard light that streamed off the sea. How easy it would be to end it all, Aaron thought, all he needed to do was walk into the warm ocean, keep going until he could no longer feel solid ground under him. It would all be over so quickly. No one would miss him. His uncle and aunt would simply think he had run away from home, and they wouldn’t even bother to inform his mother and Daniel. And his mother’s letters, those neat postcards that she had written to him every week for nearly eight years now, how long would it be before they stopped? Probably not until her own death, for although he hadn’t replied to a single one, she had kept them coming. Anger flared within him once more as he remembered her latest. Kaveri had read it out to him with something approaching glee, for in it Charity had reiterated her wish to see him settled. When his aunt had asked with feigned concern whether she should reply to the postcard, he had glared and turned his back on her. But he couldn’t hold on to his anger for too long. The heat and the unhappiness within him rose up, blotting out everything. He thought again of how easy it would be to finish it, put an end to the twenty-four depressing years that he had lived.
Further up the beach, mirages moved in the shimmering heat haze, stirred dormant memories of battle. Joshua-chithappa, his father Solomon, how often had he replayed in his mind the way they had fought! He remembered the day he had jumped the well, the strength of his uncle freeing him from his own limitations. Neither his father nor his uncle would approve, he decided, were he to kill himself. He saw himself battling the Marudar chief, avenging his uncle’s death, and something occurred to him: How long had it been since he’d handled a silambu? If he’d had one in his hands, he would have thrashed those rowdies so badly that Swami would have given him free run of his shop for the rest of his days. He picked up a fallen coconut frond and stripped away the dried leaves. It was an awkward staff, with neither the weight nor the symmetry to give it any sort of balance, but he twirled it around experimentally, and then with greater concentration, trying hard to keep it under control. He was so absorbed in the endeavour that it was a while before he heard the sound of clapping, a feeble sound against the great expanse of sea and sky.
Iyer walked out of the fringe of palms that led down to the beach.
‘Nambi told me about your little problem in town,’ he said, after the initial pleasantries were over.
‘I don’t see Nambi any more,’ Aaron said stiffly.
‘Yes, I know that . . .’ A pause, and then Iyer said, ‘What you did was wrong. The revolution does not prey on poor shopkeepers.’
‘You do not tell me what I should or shouldn’t do,’ Aaron said furiously.
‘The revolution is bigger than any of us, Aaron,’ Iyer said quietly.
‘I do not care about your stupid revolution,’ Aaron said, still angry.
‘I can see that. I’m wasting my time here,’ Iyer said. He was making to go when Aaron stopped him, his mind racing. Minutes ago, he’d been thinking of killing himself . . . his brief entanglement with Iyer’s organization had been the only time in his life he had ever felt he was doing something worthwhile, and now he was throwing it all away. Trying to keep the desperation out of his voice, he said, ‘Wait, wait, anna, I’d like to try again . . . What would you like me to do?’
Iyer told him that volunteers were needed to participate in a risky game – the smuggling of banned or proscribed revolutionary literature printed in the French territory of Pondicherry into British India. Aaron didn’t hesitate – he would be glad to take part.
On his second assignment (each ‘mule’ was used only twice for fear that their faces might get too familiar to the frustrated authorities), Aaron entered the second-class compartment at Pondicherry to find a young woman in a blue cotton sari already occupying a seat. It was virtually unknown for a woman to travel alone, but he was even more surprised when she spoke to him. ‘Shekhar, I’m your cousin, Jayanthi. I arrived early as my classes finished sooner than I expected.’ How resourceful the Extremist leaders were, he thought admiringly. Finding a pretty young woman to take on this assignment was a master-stroke. Who would ever think her capable? But wasn’t her suitcase supposed to be checked for proscribed literature on the platform?
As if reading his mind, she said, ‘The authorities have changed their routine. Now the luggage is to be checked on the train.’ As she was saying this, he spotted two beefy European sergeants strolling up the corridor inspecting the baggage. They rummaged through their suitcases, found nothing incriminating (the incendiary literature was cleverly concealed) and moved on.
As the train picked up speed, Aaron covertly examined his travelling companion. He had never been alone with a woman outside his family, and he found the experience unsettling. She had immersed herself in a novel she had taken from her handbag as the train left the station and she hadn’t looked up from it once. He strained to read the title. Sense and Sensibility. He had never heard of the author. So was she the bored daughter of some rich man from the city, with a fancy English education, doing this for the thrill of it? Then he remembered that he too had joined the Extremists out of boredom. Strangely, this thought made him annoyed. He glared out of the window for a while, then his eyes slid across to where she sat. A pair of coal-black eyes was studying him coolly, and he looked away in panic. When he next dared look in her direction, she was absorbed in the book. What could he say to her, he thought, to get a conversation started, make her pay him some attention? He wished miserably that he was sophisticated and wise, that he could discuss the great movements of history with her, perhaps even the finer points of the revolution. But the revolution was never to be discussed in public.
They parted wordlessly at the station. Aaron never saw Jayanthi again. But for a while, whenever he thought of her, and he often did, he would be filled with a delicious happiness. It was unnerving and annoying but he couldn’t help himself. He would sometimes say the name, Jayanthi, out loud, before feeling foolish at uttering a false name reverentially. He would look at every young woman who resembled her as if by some alchemy she could become Jayanthi. He imagined her by his side. He thought about how his lips would feel on hers, how they would move over those smoky eyes, gently kissing them shut . . . But even the most intense fantasies need fuel. As the weeks passed, her memory grew fainter and after a while he didn’t think of her at all.
38
Dr Pillai disappeared from the vaidyasalai a few days before the onset of the monsoon. He told Daniel the day before that he would be gone for a short while, and that he would be in charge during his absence. Once he had overcome his initial apprehension, Daniel found that the first day went off rather well.
For over a week he hadn’t run into too mu
ch trouble, but the young farmer he had just spent half an hour examining mystified him. He suffered from violent headaches that no amount of medication could relieve. Daniel had tried everything he knew. He had taken the patient’s pulse, examined his tongue and eyes and found nothing abnormal. The young man’s urine smelled a bit like wild rain, which hinted at a slight kapham disorder, but that couldn’t be causing the headache. He knew he was doing all right, and the patients he’d treated seemed happy enough, but all it needed was one wrong diagnosis, one admission of ignorance, for his slender reputation to disappear. The prospect of failure didn’t bear thinking about. He examined the patient once more. The young man seemed perfectly healthy except for the way he tilted his head awkwardly to one side. Daniel helped him across to the window, held his head up to the light and smiled at what he saw.
‘Do you take snuff?’ he asked the villager.
‘Yes, aiyah,’ the patient replied, ‘but not for a few days, the pain is terrible . . .’
Daniel looked thoughtful. ‘Are you carrying any snuff with you?’
When the man nodded, Daniel asked him to take a generous pinch. He watched the patient take out the snuff, push it painfully into his nostrils. There was an explosive sneeze. Daniel called to Chandran to bring him a slim probing tool. He grasped the villager’s head firmly and carefully removed a long leech from the nostril. ‘Try not to bathe in the same tank as your cows and buffaloes,’ he said as he sent the farmer off. He was about to call for the next patient, when he realized there was someone else in the room. How long had Dr Pillai been there?
‘Excellently done, thambi. No physician ever learned his skills from books alone. A good doctor needs instinct, experience and common sense.’ With that he was gone. Daniel realized he was still holding the leech in his fingers and hastily disposed of it.
In the months that followed, Dr Pillai taught Daniel how to use metals like mercury and cinnabar to avert the corruption of cells; he showed him how poisons like arsenic and datura could be used to cure and not to kill; and he even allowed him a glimpse into the dangerous therapy called varma where the physician manipulated the life centres of afflicted patients directly, a proscribed procedure for all but the most skilled, for it could lead to death or permanent disability.
Dr Pillai began to disappear more frequently from the clinic now. Some of these trips, he told Daniel, were to prospect for rare herbs in the ancient Palani hills where he had received his own training as a physician. With every absence, Daniel grew more confident about managing on his own, but he was totally unprepared for Dr Pillai’s announcement that he was turning the clinic over to him.
It had rained heavily all day. After the last patient had left, Daniel had sat for a while listening to the rain dripping outside his window, trying to summon up the energy to go home, when Dr Pillai had walked into his room. He said without ceremony, ‘It is the duty of every practitioner of siddha to devote himself, when the time is right, to the single-minded quest for perfection – in siddha, in our lives, in our quest for the Lord, in our pursuit of kaya kalpa. It is time I freed myself from distraction . . . It is time for me to go.’
‘But what about your practice, aiyah, everything you’ve built up?’ Daniel interrupted in alarm.
‘The ancient physicians were wandering ascetics. They owned nothing and they wanted for nothing. Not all of us are called, but when we receive the call . . . My time has come. My patients will not suffer at your hands, thambi. You were always an excellent pharmacist, but I’m really impressed by how good your diagnostic skills have become.’
Weeks passed, and Dr Pillai remained at the vaidyasalai. Daniel’s initial panic relaxed. But he knew that when his mentor decided to go he would leave as suddenly as he had made his announcement. There was little Daniel could do but prepare himself as best he could.
Without telling Charity that the clinic would soon be in his charge, he said that he was ready to be married. Charity wasted no time in writing to her brother Stephen in Nuwara Eliya in Ceylon. They had agreed, when his second daughter Lily was born, that she would be Daniel’s bride but it had been touch and go as to whether the marriage would take place. When Lily turned eighteen, Stephen had agreed to wait for just one more year.
Charity’s brother arrived with his family a fortnight before the wedding, bearing all manner of gifts and gold to pay for the festivities. Charity cried when she welcomed Lily, a tall, slim girl with a delightfully tip-tilted nose. But this time they were tears of joy. At the church, as Daniel tied the thali around his bride’s neck, Charity sniffled into her handkerchief in the approved manner.
Rachel was unable to attend the wedding as she was by then pregnant. Charity’s first grandchild was born three days after Christmas. He was a large, unlovely baby, but in the eyes of his mother and grandmother he was the most beautiful creature in the world. On the forty-first day after his birth, Jason was blessed in the family church at Tinnevelly. Charity travelled to her son-in-law’s house bearing gifts for the child: a silver belt, a gold chain and a gold ring. Just after the church ceremony she quietly put a large spot of kohl on the baby’s cheek to absorb the effects of the evil eye.
39
‘Which is the most dangerous caste among us, more dangerous than the cobra, more destructive than a cyclone?’ Neelakantha Brahmachari asked the fifty or so villagers who gathered under a pipal tree.
There was no response, so the speaker began to work the audience. ‘Could it be the Brahmin? I’m a Brahmin and you know how deadly we can be!’ The crowd laughed at this and Aaron thought it was marvellous that a member of a community that had been accused of oppression and discrimination for centuries could poke fun at his own. Truly this revolution was a wonderful thing! The speaker, a compactly built young man in his mid-twenties, smiled fiercely. ‘I’m waiting for an answer! I’ve heard about the great wisdom that is supposed to repose in this village!’
‘Andavars,’ someone shouted.
‘No, no, Vedhars,’ objected another.
‘Tamasiks,’ a voice yelled.
The speaker called for silence. ‘No, my friends. The deadliest among us is the white man who has come from over the seas in the name of a distant king to take away our wealth, our well-being, our very essence. To them, we are less than the pariah dog that you kick out of the way.’
The young man was warming to his theme now. ‘This is what every white man believes: that you and you and you, all of us, are inferior to him from birth.’ He paused dramatically. ‘And it gets worse. There was once an exalted white man called Macaulay who, after spending exactly three and a half years in India, had this to say about our medicine, literature and language which were flourishing when Europe was still a place of savages – that we had “medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet tall and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’’.’ Aaron had heard dozens of speakers, and he had often wondered why they persisted in using references that made little sense to a rural audience. But this speaker was quick to recover.
‘If this is their opinion of us, what are they here for? The answer is simple, brothers and sisters: To take the rice from our mouths, to take the gold thalis from our daughters’ necks, to eat our cows and bullocks, so that their children may fatten at the expense of ours. They are a blight on our lives, brothers and sisters, and it is the duty of every one of you to join the great battle.’
Later that night, Aaron, Iyer and Neelakantha Brahmachari ate together at a supporter’s house. They had all congregated at this anonymous village to discuss future strategies for the region, far from the prying eyes of the authorities, who were now seriously worried by the upsurge of nationalist activity in the hitherto placid Presidency. After they had finished a simple meal of sambhar and rice with a single raw onion and two green chillies apiece, Iyer drew Aaron aside.
/> ‘The time has come for a parting of the ways, Aaron,’ he said without preamble. ‘You are ready for the next step. You will work with Neelakantha from now on.’ Aaron hadn’t been prepared for this. Iyer had been his one support during every moment of crisis over the past year and a half. As if sensing his thoughts, Iyer reached across and gripped him by the shoulder. ‘The revolution does not encourage the forging of attachments, Aaron. It’s greater than we are. We must be prepared for every sacrifice it demands.’ Then, to mitigate the blow, he added, ‘But you’ll like Neelakantha. I’ve chosen carefully.’
Iyer had indeed picked his replacement with care. As they made their way to the railway station in the next town, Aaron traded notes with Neelakantha Brahmachari. His initial admiration deepened. He discovered that he was a journalist from Madras who had been sucked into the movement by a Bengali revolutionary. He belonged to a group called the Satya Vrata Sangam, but was thinking of starting his own organization, to which Iyer had recommended he recruit Aaron.
‘I’ll get in touch with you soon,’ his new friend said as they parted.
All through 1909 Aaron criss-crossed the Presidency, along with dozens of other young idealists like himself, raising the nationalist consciousness of the people. A small stipend of twenty-five rupees a month paid by the organization took care of all his physical needs, and frequent meetings with a host of inspiring leaders kept his revolutionary instincts well primed.
He was exhilarated by the travelling, especially at night – the great black locomotives hissing and snorting out of dimly lit stations, expelling steam from every joint, their fiery hearts driving them through the endless dark. He loved arriving at dusty country stations – Maniyachi, Kovilpatti, Tenkasi, Rajapalaiyam, Sirivilliputtur, Shencottah – and towns that he might never see again but that nevertheless left their mark on him. He devised a mnemonic device to remember each of them, usually a local landmark or event that lodged itself in his memory – an avenue of enormous tamarind trees in Tenkasi, an ornate temple in Palani, a brilliantly coloured fair in Kumbakonam. He often thought of Joshua-chithappa and his travelling ways – what had driven him? Aaron could now understand at least a part of it: the excitement of new places opening up his mind, the sense of freedom that anonymity provided . . .
The House of Blue Mangoes Page 19
