The House of Blue Mangoes

by Davidar, David

  A fortnight later there was another death to mourn. Rachel died giving birth to her third child, a daughter who didn’t survive her mother by more than a few hours. Charity was beside herself with grief. Ramdoss had recently accepted an offer from Daniel to help with the expanding business. He had been in the process of moving to Nagercoil when disaster struck. The sight of Rachel’s beloved children, already confused by the move and now without a mother, made Charity push her own grief to the back of her mind. She must not let her grandchildren down; she must not let her daughter down.

  Through all this, Aaron’s capture and arraignment formed a grim backdrop. Daniel, pitched into the unfamiliar role of head of the family after Jacob’s death, tried his best to get to see his brother. He wrote to every person in authority he could think of, asking for help. His greatest hope was his father’s friend Chris Cooke in Madras. But Cooke pleaded his inability to help. The Government was making no concession to the conspirators. They were determined to make an example of them. Aaron was accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an official of the state and there would be no leniency. Still Daniel hoped . . . that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that his brother had been wrongfully detained, that he was innocent. When Aaron was sentenced to prison, the family’s grief grew so vast and intolerable that it exhausted them of every emotion. They went about their daily routine mechanically, and the cottage grew still and cold. The children forgot their natural exuberance and crept around the house like small sullen animals, and even Miriam didn’t throw a single tantrum, pitching in as best she could with her mother and sister-in-law. Visitors who came to condole left as soon as they could, shocked by the immensity of the family’s sorrow, and secretly glad that it hadn’t been allotted to them instead.

  When Aaron began his jail sentence, Charity finally broke. For a dozen years, her estrangement from her son had been a hard knot of pain at the centre of her existence and now it expanded and blotted everything from her world. Daniel first became aware that something was wrong when she woke him one morning with his coffee. As was usual, he was already awake, although his eyes were shut, milking the last drops of sleep. Instead of leaving the coffee by his side and going her way, he suddenly heard her call out, her voice viperish, ‘Begone, chaatan. Get away from that window. Leave my surviving son alone.’

  Daniel woke up with a start and said, ‘What is it, amma?’ She didn’t look at him but continued to glare furiously at the locked and shuttered window. She spoke fiercely once more. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. How dare you think you can enter this house of the Lord?’ Daniel leapt up, hastily secured his lungi and gently shook his mother, asking her what the matter was. She told him in a harsh, strained voice that there was a sinister little man, dressed all in black, squatting on the window-sill. Daniel looked to where she pointed but there was nothing. He led her muttering back to her room, unrolled her sleeping mat, and gave her a potion to sedate her. He told Lily to take over her chores for the day.

  After the incident of the demon on the window-sill, Charity’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre. She would wander up to whoever was in the room and begin talking to them in a guttural voice of the huge evil she glimpsed behind their eyes and how it would need to be extinguished if the world were to be a better place. At other times she would address the person nearest her as Aaron and begin weeping and asking for forgiveness for being such a heartless mother. Lily began to fear for the children’s welfare and would never leave them alone in their grandmother’s presence, although Charity showed no signs of violence. Her hair, still black in late middle age, started turning white.

  Daniel became seriously concerned when she took to going out in the evening, as the lamplighters began to light up the town, to accost strangers and warn them of the hell-fire and plague that would consume them if they did not give up their sinful ways. He began treating her the siddha way, pooling oil on her head to cool her fevered mind, making her inhale the vapours of herbs, massaging her with therapeutic oils. When none of these seemed to help, he reluctantly agreed to follow the advice of Lily and the padre of the Home Church (who had prayed without any discernible result over Charity for weeks) that he should take his mother to the church in Ranivoor town, a day’s journey to the northwest.

  Charity didn’t protest when Daniel announced they were going on a trip. Two days later, they were in a jutka whirring along a narrow road that ran like the spine of an open book through fields of emerald rice. Eventually they arrived at their destination, St Luke’s Church, whose patron saint was famous throughout the district for his success in curing people possessed by spirits. The church proper was a little outside the busy town of Ranivoor, the second biggest in the district. Their route took them past the crowded main bazaar, a scattering of imposing government buildings and the squat, forbidding Sub-jail. A little further on, the crush of buildings thinned out and soon they were on the outskirts of the town. St Luke’s loomed up before them.

  A small settlement, two rows of houses and shops, had grown up around the massive building. Makeshift kiosks sold rosaries, crucifixes, pictures of a pink-faced St Luke, rings, amulets, chains, roasted peanuts and gram. The streets were filled with the families of those who had come to seek the help of the saint. Every community was represented – caste Hindus, and those beyond the pale of caste, Muslims, Christians – and every slice of society: poor labourers and farmers mingled with landlords and townspeople dressed in expensive cottons and silks. Finding lodgings in one of the houses that catered to travellers, Daniel settled Charity in and ventured out in search of food and provisions.

  Near one of the shops, he heard a clanking behind him, and looked around to see a man of medium height with frizzy hair walking along the road, his eyes wide and staring. He was conservatively dressed, but wore no shoes. With a peculiar thrill, Daniel realized that his ankles were bound together with two crude hoops of steel. There didn’t seem to be anyone minding him, and after staring vacantly at Daniel for a while, the madman shuffled off, his dragging gait raising little puffs of dust. Now Daniel began to notice that a fair proportion of the crowd possessed an empty gaze. Many seemed to have been left to wander by themselves as their families took a break. He presumed these were harmless lunatics. The townspeople were obviously used to having them around. Making inquiries, he learned that the exorcisms would begin in the evening, after a special church service.

  The brief evening service, a daily affair, was conducted with the minimum of ceremony and ritual. The priest, a harassed-looking man, with exophthalmic eyes and an unruly beard, made a practised sermon, obviously one he had been delivering for years, on Jesus casting out devils. Drawn from Luke, the text centred on the madman whom the Son of God encountered in the country of the Gadarenes.

  ‘And Jesus asked him, “What is thy name?” And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him.’

  The priest talked about Christ’s numerous encounters with the many forms of Satan. He cited the power Christ gave to his seventy disciples:

  ‘“Behold, I give you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy.”’

  His voice grew animated.

  ‘And that is the power the Lord Jesus gives all those who call upon him with a humble heart.’

  He blessed the congregation and retreated swiftly.

  When they filed out of the church, volunteers funnelled the crowds into an open area around a pillared hall, roofed, but without walls. On the floor was a thick layer of sand. The hall abutted a grotto that had a terracotta statue of St Luke painted in garish colours. The statue of the saint was protected by an iron portcullis. A steady stream of devotees filed past the likeness. Every inch of space around the pillared hall was packed with people, a large proportion of them villagers dressed in lungis and cheap saris, out for an evening’s entertainment. Peanut vendors hawked their wares, skilfully wending their way through the patient crowd. A few torches flickered dully here and there, scarcely
illuminating those closest to them. In contrast, the pillared hall blazed with the light of dozens of lanterns like a spotlit stage on which the actors would presently arrive.

  On cue, a nondescript young man who had been strolling around on the fringes of the crowd gave a huge roar and headed for the statue of the saint at a dead run. With a loud wail, he leapt into the air and crashed head first into the iron bars with a sickening thump. His fettered hands clinked against the saint’s cage. He rushed at the saint again. A long, ecstatic sigh escaped the crowd – this was what they had been waiting for. Behind Daniel, a man was talking to his neighbour. ‘Did you see that? If you or I had hit our head against those bars they would have cracked open like coconuts. It’s the devil inside him that keeps him from injury. The devils can’t stand the saint, that’s why they try to attack him.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s quite a spectacle. I’ve been coming here for nearly seven years, at least once a month. It’s better than any therukoothu or villupaatu.’

  And so it was. The roaring man was now joined by two beautiful young girls dressed in their best saris, their faces expressionless masks. They cavorted around the hall, bouncing up and down as if on steel springs, moaning deep in their throats. Then, taking long run-ups like well-jumpers, they soared into the air in unison, turning perfect cartwheels before landing on the ground with a thud.

  ‘Did you see their saris? Even when they were upside down, they didn’t fall down around their waists. It’s the devils which keep them glued to their bodies,’ the knowledgeable villager said. And indeed it did seem incredible that no matter how frenziedly the girls threw themselves about, their carefully plaited hair and their clothes remained unruffled.

  Daniel was sickened by the carnival atmosphere. He hadn’t brought Charity here to be made a spectacle of. She had remained quiet throughout the evening, only glancing up occasionally if there was an especially boisterous man or woman on the lighted stage. Not wanting to risk exposing her to the statue, Daniel took her the long way round to the room in the church where the priest was receiving supplicants. When their turn came, Daniel explained the situation, while Charity sat impassively. The padre tried talking to Charity, but she would not reply. Giving up quickly, as the crowd pressed up against them, he said a short prayer, sprinkled water on her, made the sign of the cross and gave Daniel a slip of paper on which was written a verse from the Bible and a cheap copper pendant bearing a vague likeness of the saint. The exorcism was over. ‘Bow before the saint. The devils in her will be challenged.’

  ‘Will she be cured?’

  ‘Depends on her faith in the Lord. She could be cured right away or it could take a while.’

  Daniel was going to ask more questions but the priest had already turned to the next visitor. Nervously he shepherded Charity into the queue of devotees filing past the shrine. As they approached the statue, Daniel’s anxiety increased, but he needn’t have worried. The demons within his mother weren’t perturbed by the presence of the saint. Charity walked silently past the statue.

  They returned home the next day. Daniel reverted to siddha ways of treatment. As the months went by and Charity didn’t get any worse, he began to worry less. Then her sorrow manifested itself again, in a quite unexpected way.

  46

  The beggars of Nagercoil were an organized lot. Although there were dozens of them, they had worked out a very professional system by which all the members of their fraternity would benefit. Territories for each beggar or group were clearly mapped out, so they didn’t compete unfairly with anyone else. Some would stake out temples and places of pilgrimage, others would haunt cremation grounds and cemeteries, and the majority would criss-cross town, arriving at certain streets on predetermined days, taking care to keep the frequency of their visits low so that the good housewives of Nagercoil didn’t tire of them.

  Very early one morning, the old wall-eyed woman who had been taken on to help around the house when Charity had fallen ill came rushing in to Lily’s room screaming, ‘The kitchen is on fire, the house is on fire.’

  Lily hastily accompanied the servant to the kitchen, where she found the earthen stove wreathed in flames. It had been stuffed so full of firewood and coconut husks that a portion of the kitchen did seem to be on fire. A large container that was full of something that smelled like stew sat on the burning fuel. Charity calmly watched the fire. It was three in the morning.

  Lily went up to her mother-in-law and anxiously asked her if everything was all right. Charity muttered something. Later, Lily would tell her husband that it sounded like ‘hunger must be fed’, but she wasn’t sure. For now, she helped Charity make the chicken stew. There was enough in the container to feed at least two dozen people, but Charity had no answer for why she had cooked so much. From that day onwards, the hearth in the little kitchen would devour massive amounts of fuel from morning to night as Charity and the crone cooked and cooked, churning out an astonishing variety of food – appams thin, soft and papery, towers of puttu liberally laced with grated coconut, athirasam crumbling like moist, fragrant earth, hillocks of idiyappam light and diaphanous as spiders’ webs, basins of stew and sweetened coconut milk, neimeen kolambu, shrimp curry and vast mountains of biryani that perfumed the house and the neighbourhood.

  Unsurprisingly, the family could eat barely a fraction of these monumental feasts, so the beggars benefited. The regulars paid a visit every Saturday, rattling tin or coconut-shell receptacles against the bars of the gate to alert the household to their arrival. As soon as Charity’s cooking binge began, word spread that there was food to spare. Within days, the cottage became a daily stop at lunch-time for scores of beggars who waited impatiently for their share of heaped portions of biryani spiked with succulent chunks of mutton or chicken (for some reason Charity never cooked a fish biryani), or platters of dosai or slabs of halwa glistening like polished granite, or tamarind rice, or whatever it was that Charity had decided to make that day.

  Sometimes the food would taste strange: onion-flavoured halwa, for example, or sweet biryani, as Charity carried experimentation too far. But, by and large, the beggars ate well. Some wouldn’t even do their daily rounds, preferring to camp near the cottage so as to have to make the minimum effort.

  It was an expensive business, but Daniel decided that so long as it was therapeutic he would finance his mother’s passion. Gradually, Charity’s labours grew less frenzied, to the great disappointment of the beggars. A couple of months later, the clattering of their vessels at the gate drew no reaction from her. It appeared that the vast grief that had unbalanced her had finally been dissipated by her furious activity. Still, Daniel was cautious. A fortnight passed, and then a month, and still she behaved normally. He slowly relaxed his vigilance. But it was evident that the long road back to sanity had taken its toll. Her speech was slower, her mannerisms deliberate, and her hair had turned completely white. To restore her fully would take something more – perhaps the safe return of Aaron. Daniel redoubled his efforts to try and persuade the authorities to allow him to visit his brother.

  47

  The skirts of the Great War brushed past India. Over one hundred thousand Indian soldiers were killed or wounded at Mons and Verdun, Ypres and Gallipoli, but the subcontinent itself was threatened only briefly. Soon after the war started, a sleek whippy German battle-cruiser, the Emden, appeared off the coast of Madras and began shelling the sweltering city. The effect was remarkable. Around seventy thousand people, almost a quarter of the population, panicked and began streaming out of town. But a brave, or foolhardy, throng gathered on the Marina to get a closer look. To their disgust, the German warship decided that shelling Madras was poor sport and moved on to the Southeast Asian coast where she was eventually dispatched by the Australian battle-cruiser, Sydney. Three people died and thirteen were wounded as a result of the Emden’s brief foray into Indian waters, but she had made a powerful impression: for years to come, a bully any
where in the Presidency was known as an Emden.

  But the war had other, more far-reaching consequences. For a start, virtually all the political organizations previously opposed to the British closed ranks solidly behind them. The country’s new-found support for their rulers contributed to the collapse of the Extremist struggle in the south. Violent revolution continued for a while elsewhere, but in Madras it was only a matter of time before it was relegated to the status of a minor historical footnote.

  In his spacious office overlooking the Marina, Chris Cooke was thinking about the revolutionaries and Aaron Dorai in particular. He wondered whether he would have been able to prevent Aaron’s involvement if he had revisited Kilanad district and Chevathar, as he’d promised himself he would. The thought made him feel guilty. Although he had managed to obtain a transfer to the districts after his first stint in the capital, he hadn’t served in Kilanad. Marriage and two children later, he had actually applied for a transfer back to Madras. His wife loved the city. There were better schools. And he’d begun to enjoy his work and the diversions of the metropolis. He made new friends, took part in amateur theatricals, enjoyed his excursions to Ooty in the summer – his life began to take on all the hallmarks of a privileged colonial.