The House of Blue Mangoes (6 page)

Trudging home, Father Ashworth had covertly studied the boy. His fine, delicate features, matchstick-thin arms and large expressive eyes properly belonged in a more cloistered world. Studious and gentle, cosseted by his mother and his aunt, Daniel was a misfit in the very male world of the Dorais. None of the Dorais of Solomon’s generation had ever studied beyond the fourth standard, which was all that the mission school offered. With Father Ashworth’s support Daniel had managed to get his father to send him to the Government Secondary School in Meenakshikoil (Aaron had reluctantly followed in his older brother’s footsteps but had dropped out after a while). Daniel had made it plain to everyone that he wanted to study further, to be a doctor or at the very least a botanist. However, every time he or the padre brought it up, his father refused permission. Only last week, Solomon had said to the priest in Daniel’s presence, ‘We are farmers and you do not learn to read the weather from books.’

But the boy refused to give up his dream. There’s the Dorai steel in him somewhere, Father Ashworth thought. He might look and think differently to the other men in his family, but beneath the gentle exterior there was a stubbornness and determination that would not yield easily.

Thinking of the boy’s plight, Father Ashworth’s mood grew sombre. He looked pensively out of the window of the church at the Gulf of Mannar. The sea was flat and grey as a heron’s eye, the sky overcast. As always, except when the fishermen put out to sea and returned in the evening with the day’s catch, the beach was deserted. Just then the sacristan walked in and announced Solomon Dorai. This was wholly unexpected. The priest rose hurriedly, walked down the hollow wall and welcomed his visitor.

The thalaivar looked disturbed and when he had finished relating the day’s events, Father Ashworth could see why. Over the years, he had come to admire how Solomon’s iron will and clear-headed rule kept the village free of caste and religious conflict.

‘Dipty Vedhar and I agree that we must take the strongest possible action. All the taluqas here and in Tinnevelly district have been told to be on their guard as there is talk that major caste disturbances are expected. But why should such things happen in Chevathar? We’ve always been free of this infection, even when the rest of the district was in turmoil,’ Solomon said unhappily.

‘It’s the times, my friend,’ Father Ashworth said. A thought struck him. ‘Do you remember the episode from the
Bhagavatam
that those visiting villupaatu players enacted at the Pongal festivities?’

‘Which one?’ asked the headman distractedly.

‘You know, the one where the Gods churn the ocean using the mountain Mandara as the churn and the serpent Vasuki as the churning rope?’

‘Yes, yes. What of it?’

‘Well, the Gods were looking for amrita, the elixir of eternal life, that lay in the depths of the ocean, to protect them in their war against the demons, and Lord Narayana told them that the only way to get it would be to churn . . .’

‘I know the story,’ Solomon said.

‘But do you remember what happened before Dhanwantari appeared from the bottom of the ocean with the golden vessel containing amrita?’

‘Yes, I do, the divine cow Kamadhenu appeared, then Airavata, the four-headed tusked elephant, and then Parijata, the tree of life, and then, and then I forget . . . But what does this have to do with the poison that’s affecting Chevathar?’

‘Poison, that’s what,’ the priest said, triumphantly if mysteriously. ‘The first thing that appeared when the ocean was churned was the deadly poison Halahala. It tainted and killed everything it touched. That’s what’s happening today. As discontent, envy and unhappiness swirl through all the castes, communities and creeds in this land, it’s inevitable that poison, hate and envy will be generated. But if we hold firm, do what is right in the eyes of God and man, then eventually virtue and goodness will prevail. Peace and prosperity . . .’

Any further thoughts the priest may have had on the subject were cut short, for his visitor rose. ‘I’m sorry, padre, I’ve got to be going. I’ve told Dipty Vedhar that I will have everyone who can throw light on the matter interrogated.’ As he stooped to enter the hollow wall, he called out, ‘There’s a meeting of the panchayat this evening. It would be good if you could come.’

After Solomon had gone, the padre retreated to his position by the window. The sun had burned away the overcast and hammered the back of the sea into a mass of shimmering golden scales, but even this sight did not lift his spirits. Seeing Solomon Dorai so twitchy and nervous was depressing. But the headman was right to be anxious. And it upset the priest that he had been unable to offer him the reassurance that he had sought.

As he lingered by the window in the lengthening morning, the enchantment of the scene before him began to soothe and settle his mind. At the limits of his vision, the pale beige of the sky merged with the golden skin of the sea, with only the thinnest of lines showing where the earth’s rim separated the two. Out of those depths they had come, foreign adventurers and travellers by the shipload, to marvel at and to be seduced by the astonishing riches of India. Megasthenes, Pliny, Strabo, Eusebius, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Wassafi, Rashid-ud-din, Caesar Frederic, Vasco da Gama – the greatest voyagers and writers of their time – knew of the magnificence and wealth of the nations of the Coromandel coast long before Robert Clive and John Company began to dream of shaking the pagoda tree.

He thought of the village as his home now. He had not visited England for seven years. His only surviving relative, an aged aunt who lived in an old people’s home in Buckinghamshire, had gone senile, and had not recognized him on his last visit. In addition, he found the dark drizzly weather a trial. It was with a sense of relief that he had boarded the steamer at Southampton for Madras. Seventeen of his fifty-two years had been spent in Chevathar. This was where he wanted to live and work and this was where, by God’s grace, he hoped he would die.

His thoughts returned to the problem Solomon was facing. When he had arrived in India twenty-five years ago, he had been appalled above all else by the institution of caste. He had tried to understand the viewpoint of those who argued that caste was necessary to give the country’s vast and diverse population a sense of identity and belonging, but surely that did not excuse the injustice and barbarity perpetrated in its name! How could any sane and compassionate human being abide the discrimination sanctioned by caste and religion upon his fellows, based entirely on self-serving interpolations in the great religious texts? The solution, he believed, wasn’t to do away with the Scriptures but to refashion them. To preserve the extraordinary truths at their core and discard the rest. The
Manusmriti
, the Old Testament, and scores of other holy texts could do with judicious editing and interpretation. But would it ever happen? He knew that he had neither the scholarship nor the sagacity to attempt such a task. It could only be accomplished by a savant and visionary of the highest order.

In the meantime, in an attempt to further his own understanding, he had begun work on a book that sought to collate and compare the sublime truths of Hinduism and Christianity, shorn of the thickets of obfuscation that surrounded them. Work on it had progressed slowly because of his own failings as a writer and a thinker, but also because of the numerous other matters that fought for his attention. He glanced across at the communion table on which lay sheets of the manuscript of
Some Thoughts on the Hindu-Christian Encounter
. Perhaps he should start work on it now; it might help clarify his thoughts, give him some helpful insight that he could pass on to Solomon.

8

In Chevathar, the birth of a son was greeted with the kuruvai – a long-drawn-out call ululating from the throats of aunts and sisters. It sounded like a dirge but was in fact an expression of overwhelming joy. Blessed was the mother of a son. Blessed was the family into which a son was born. He would extend the family line, bring in dowry and good luck and attract the blessings of the Gods. A girl, on the other hand, was greeted with downcast faces. A girl meant nothing but sorrow. One more unproductive mouth to feed and heavy expense for the family – dowry, marriage costs, the endless demands of in-laws who had done her parents a favour by taking her off their hands. Many despondent mothers quickly extinguished the life of the luckless baby, especially if she had arrived at the tail end of a succession of daughters – by smothering her, feeding her the poisonous sap of the calotropis plant or the roots of the valli shrub, or encouraging her to ingest sharp-edged husks of rice grain which could fatally puncture the alimentary tract of an infant. If she was allowed to live, the girl was never allowed to forget that through her the family was paying for its sins in past births. All this in a land where the highest deity was Devi, the Mother Goddess, created by the commingling of the essence of the great Hindu trinity – Brahma, Narayana and Parameshwara – to rid the world of an evil they could not handle themselves.

Every woman in the village quickly learned her place in life, no matter how exalted her station. When Charity first arrived in the Big House as a young bride, she was shocked when Solomon hit her for not bringing him his coffee at exactly the right temperature. Tearfully she had returned to the kitchen. When she told her mother-in-law about the incident, Thangammal had wiped away her tears with her sari pallu, and told her something she had never forgotten: ‘In these parts, my daughter, a woman must be prepared to be beaten by her husband. If he’s a good man he won’t beat you too much, and not without reason. We put up with it. It’s the way things are. When you are newly married, you are beaten for not bringing enough dowry, when you give birth to your children, you are beaten for not producing a male heir, or if you have already given him a son, for not producing only sons. And then, when you have produced enough children, you are beaten for losing your looks and your youth.’

‘But it was not so in my father’s house.’

‘You are not in your father’s house.’

‘But, mami, it’s wrong.’

‘There’s no question of wrong or right. My son is a good boy. Here, take him the coffee again.’

The circumstances of their birth and the evolution of their separate lives gave the men and women of Chevathar village sharply differing perspectives on the rape of Valli. While the men grew robust in their hate and mistrust of each other, and obsessed about the larger consequences of the tragedy, the women identified with the girl’s trauma and were reminded once more of the misfortune of being born a woman.

After the first shock of hearing the full details of the attack, a thick unease settled in Charity’s mind. She grew snappish and irritable with her sisters-in-law Kamalambal and Kaveri, she yelled at the servants and was especially harsh on her older daughter Rachel. She was surprised at first, then realized that it was the particularity of the situation that was so upsetting: the violated girl was about the same age as her own beloved daughter, she was about to be married. It could have happened to Rachel. And her mother would have been powerless to protect her. Though she kept repeating to herself that nothing had happened to Rachel, that nothing would happen to Rachel, Charity was anxious all day. She took it out on her daughter, slapping her for forgetting to put the sliced onions for the pachidi in water and for gossiping with a servant girl. The second time she slapped her, Rachel burst into tears. Charity was quick to console her. She forced herself to calm down, to concentrate on the preparation of the refreshments and the dozens of other tasks that needed to be finished in time for the meeting of the panchayat that evening.

All through that interminable morning, news continued to filter into the Big House and Charity took it all in. The girl who had been attacked had a fatal flaw in her birth horoscope as well as in her menstrual horoscope, it was whispered, the dreaded mula natchattiram would explain her misfortune. After a while it was reported that it was not the mula natchattiram that had led to the girl’s downfall, but the even more feared naga dosham. A few women claimed to have seen a large cobra-shaped discoloration near the girl’s groin, the mark signifying that an invisible snake lurked in the girl’s genitalia to cause the death of the first man to have sex with her. It was said that her parents had concealed the information for fear that the girl would never get married. Others said it had nothing to do with imperfect horoscopes at all, it was a jilted lover who had assaulted Valli.

Charity had barely met the girl’s family but by noon she knew most of the details of their lives, some accurate, most invented. She was informed that Ponnammal, the girl’s mother, had recently given birth to her ninth child, even though, in her late thirties, her childbearing years should have been almost over. She was told that misfortune had visited the family because of a curse directed at the girl’s father by his brother-in-law who lived two villages away for defaulting on a loan. As the fragments and stories grew more fanciful and extreme, they began to distance Charity from the horror she had felt earlier in the day.

She started to get Solomon’s lunch ready. As she worked, she hoped she would be able to discuss the attack with him, but long experience had taught her that she could only do so when the time was right. She had learned, over two decades ago, that her job was to keep the household running smoothly, that she had no part to play in the affairs of the village. If she’d had any doubts, an incident that had occurred when she first arrived in Chevathar had removed them. The wives of two sharecroppers had asked her to mediate in a land dispute and she had promised to talk to her husband. She had broached the subject when she was serving the evening meal and Solomon had hit her for only the second time in their marriage. Shocked and fearful, she had agreed never to interfere in matters that did not concern her.

Since then, she had discovered how to bide her time, to use elliptical ways to influence events – gentle nagging, charm, the insinuation of requests at opportune moments. It was clear, when she began to serve lunch, that this was not the right time. Solomon was brusque with her, and barely touched his food. Refusing a second helping, he washed his hands and left. His disquiet bothered Charity. She longed to help him, but what could she do? She sat silent and disturbed over her own meal, barely tasting what she ate.