The House of Blue Mangoes (23 page)

A few words between bride and groom, banal, unmemorable, and then ceremony took over – Bibles and gold chains were exchanged, saris and flowers presented to Rachel, reciprocated in cash and flowers for Ramdoss. Then lunch was announced, with the seven dishes prescribed by tradition. Charity had personally supervised the making of the two kinds of vegetables, chicken, sambhar and rasam, appalam and payasam. The bridegroom’s party was fed first. Charity waited anxiously for the first belch of appreciation and only then did she relax a little. There would be more feasts and ceremonies to be conducted before Rachel was truly wed to Ramdoss but the engagement had gone off successfully and she was content. The wedding was fixed for the most auspicious day available.

At last the morning of the wedding arrived and the noise of a marching band resounded down the narrow lane outside Jacob’s house. The
NAGERCOIL CHRISTIAN WEDDING BAND
, as a rather forlorn banner announced, was a strange hybrid: eleven men on a variety of unmatched instruments – nadeswarams and cymbals, a big bass drum, a trumpet and a brace of bugles – combining in a discordant way to produce a bizarre medley of hymns and well-known Tamil songs, ‘Rule Britannia’ and rousing marching airs. Its founder was a retired band major weaned on martial music and popular melodies, so the band tended to fall back on these once it had exhausted its slim repertoire of hymns. But no one really minded for it made plenty of noise. The groom’s party had soon attracted a fair crowd of hangers-on. By the time they reached the cottage they were nearly two hundred strong. Ramdoss and his eldest sister, both looking awkward and hot in Western clothes, opened the gate and walked up to the house. Banana stems on either side of the front door, flowers and other traditional ornamentation ensured that the groom’s party had nothing inauspicious to fear. Daniel welcomed them with garlands and young Miriam enthusiastically sprinkled them with scented water. Sandalwood paste was smeared on their brows, and then Ramdoss’s sister presented Charity with Rachel’s wedding sari – a gorgeous white-and-gold Conjeevaram silk. The women went into the house, and the men, Daniel, Jacob, Ramdoss and his close male relatives, adjourned to Jacob’s room to wait while the bride was dressed.

Nobody said much. The racket the band was making outside would have made talking difficult even if they had been so inclined. An hour, an hour and a half, and finally there was word that Rachel was ready. When she entered the room she could hardly be seen for powder, jewellery and flowers. The bride and the groom glanced at each other nervously, then took refuge among their own kin.

Charity’s brother hadn’t been able to make the journey from Ceylon so he wasn’t going to perform the traditional ceremony of giving away the bride. Jacob stood in for him. Rachel received gold bangles from her grandfather, a short prayer was murmured over the couple and they were then led to hired carriages to make their separate ways to the great Home Church in town where the wedding was to be solemnized.

The ceremony passed off without a hitch. The packed church held its collective breath when Ramdoss fumbled while tying the thali around the bride’s neck, but Daniel was there to steady him. And then it was over and the tension that had built up before the wedding disappeared in a grand feast in the pandal under the cashew tree.

Charity knew no rest. She supervised the preparation of every one of the eleven dishes to be served. Steaming mountains of white rice, aromatic vessels of chicken curry and platters of fried mutton, buckets of sambhar and avial richly seasoned with coconut, deliquescent mounds of curd rice, large containers of sweet paruppu payasam and wobbly cliffs of halwa shiny with ghee. By early evening, the last of the revellers had left or wandered away to sleep off the great feast.

But Charity’s labours were not yet done. There were gifts to be given to the family barber and the dhobi for their part in the proceedings, the hired cooks needed to be paid and the arrangements for Rachel’s journey to her husband’s home needed looking after. She sent her father off to get some rest and supervised the loading of the seven boxes of murukku, athirasam, halwa, appalams, coconuts, bananas and uncooked rice that would form the next set of gifts with which the bride would endow her husband’s house. She gave her daughter a quick hug and watched as Rachel clambered into the cart. There would be time enough for elaborate leave-taking when the ceremonies were over. Later that night Charity made her first visit to the house where Ramdoss and his family were staying. In the cart she travelled in were pots and pans, two almirahs (one with a mirror, one without), three cane chairs and a cane table, everything the couple would need to set up house. A feast was held at Ramdoss’s house to welcome his mother-in-law, although it was the bride’s family who paid for it, and Jacob presented the groom and his sister with gold rings.

The next day, Rachel returned to her own house with Ramdoss, and veshtis and other clothes were given to the groom’s close male relatives.

Not once did Charity flinch at the expense, although only she knew that her finances were almost exhausted. That Sunday, before going to church, she counted and recounted the money for the last of the marriage ceremonies – the seventh-day feast when all the groom’s relatives were fed. Six silver rupees, that’s all there was, and she knew it wouldn’t be enough. She went to church with her family, sipped coffee with her friends and relatives after the service and went about the rest of her day as usual. The next day she went to the street of goldsmiths and pawned her gold wedding thali, the only item of any value she had left. Ever since she had taken it off her own neck when Solomon died she had been saving it for Daniel’s wedding, but the Lord would provide if and when that took place, she thought wearily.

The seventh-day feast was exceedingly well attended, and the guests had never been fed so sumptuously before. Charity even daringly departed from the tradition of preparing several dishes and served only her fish biryani. Ramdoss’s family loved it and it came perilously close to being exhausted before everyone was fed. In the early hours of the morning the celebrations finally began to wind down. Charity saw Rachel slip into the house and followed her. Her daughter went to her old room and began rummaging through the battered wooden almirah. Charity touched her on the shoulder, and she turned, tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘Were you looking for something?’

‘Yes, no, amma, I was just looking, looking for something to take with me when I go away.’

Oh, my beautiful, beautiful Rachel, Charity thought, and the emotion that she had wound tightly within came undone and overwhelmed her. She held her daughter close and cried as she had seldom cried before. She wept to release the tension and the pain of the past days, she wept at the prospect of losing her daughter, she wept at the absence of Solomon and Aaron, she wept for herself. She thought about her pawned thali and how beautiful it would have looked around the neck of Daniel’s bride and she wept all the more. Her grief grew to include mothers and daughters everywhere but most especially in her part of the world, where a girl child was a necessary evil, suitable only for producing sons. She felt the pain of the village women who fed their infant daughters poison or drowned them, she agonized with young brides rejected or raped or tortured . . . She held her daughter and prayed that she would bear a dozen sons so that she would be spared some of the pain of being born a woman. The force of Charity’s sorrow fed into Rachel’s own and their grief grew immense. It blew out of that small room and wrapped itself around the remaining guests. Every woman present felt its power. They tried to hold back their tears, some not so successfully, while the men shuffled about uneasily, dimly sensing an enormous passion that, if unleashed, would consume them all.

Gradually, Charity got her weeping under control. Cradling her daughter’s tear-streaked face between her palms, she said, ‘No marriage is truly complete, kannu, until we’ve all had a good cry. Now I know you’ll be happy.’

37

A little over a decade earlier, on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of her reign, Queen Victoria, wearing a dress of black moiré embroidered with silver flowers, had presided over the greatest show on earth. Fifty thousand troops, led by two of the most imposing soldiers of the British Army (Captain Ames, who was literally the tallest man in the armed forces at six foot eight inches, and the legendary Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar), marched through the streets of London. Behind them came Australian cavalrymen and Canadian Hussars, camel-riding soldiers from Rajasthan and head-hunting Dyaks from Borneo, Chinese policemen from Hong Kong and princes from India, Cypriots and Maoris, Jamaicans and Ceylonese.

Now the competition was catching up. Russia and Germany were arming at a frenetic pace and the patriotic Briton was alarmed. The anxiety of the world’s greatest power was not misplaced, for the running sore of the Balkans threatened to infect Europe once again as Turks, Serbians, Montenegrins and Austrians broke alliances and massacred civilians and itched to resume barely restrained vendettas. In the capitals of the Great Powers, the chanceries stayed open late into the night as talk of war intensified.

In the Empire, the cracks were beginning to show. In India, the Extremists stepped up their activities against the rulers. A couple of months after the Abel Circus action, Aaron and his closest friend Nambi received a message from Iyer to go to Tuticorin where the revolutionaries were planning a major demonstration to protest against the arrest and detention of three top nationalist leaders.

Aaron and Nambi, whose knowledge of the twists and turns of the revolutionary movement was sketchy at best, knew little of the reasons for the protest meeting but they were delighted to be in the thick of the action again. When they reached Tuticorin, they found a number of agitated young men roaming around the narrow streets of the port town. As their superiors were not expected to arrive until much later, the pair set out to explore Tuticorin. It proved to be a dirty, unplanned maze of streets and shops. They found little to interest them and were glad to join the growing crowds near the Mosque Pettai. The leaders of the agitation arrived and began working the protesters into a frenzy. Aaron and Nambi were near the front of the crowd and they began to chant slogans vigorously.

Horses’ hoofs sounded on stone and metal. A posse of policemen rode up with the new Joint Magistrate of the district, Robert William d’Escourt Ashe, at its head. The crowd was ordered to disperse. The announcement was greeted with stones. Aaron was overjoyed to see a red-faced policeman to the left of the magistrate wince as his missile struck his upper arm. He was bending down again to scrabble for stones when he heard the crowd sigh. Straightening up, Aaron was riveted by what he saw. Some of the policemen on horses had dismounted. They were joined by others on foot. Bayonets fixed, they prepared to charge. Nervously, Aaron looked around for his friend. Even as he watched, Nambi, his eyes dilated with excitement, prised a large chunk of stone from the road and flung it at a policeman. It was too big to carry the fifty feet or so that separated the two groups. Instantly, Nambi began looking around for another missile. Galvanized into activity by the sight, Aaron hunted around for more missiles of his own. The clamour and thrill of another battle long ago filled his head. He found a stone and hurled it towards the police force. He could almost feel Joshua-chithappa at his elbow urging him on. Aaron suddenly roared, ‘Down with the English dogs and their faithful slaves.’ He flung another stone that was wide of the mark.

By now the policemen were in formation and Ashe gave the order to charge. Bayonets held at the ready, the men trotted forward only to be stopped by a blanket of stones and abuse. A second volley of missiles and oaths followed and the line began to turn ragged. Several of the policemen were cut and bleeding. The gap between the crowd and the policemen had lessened to about thirty feet and from that distance Aaron could see the expression in the eyes of the foe: anger, fear and confusion. More shouted commands and the crowd cheered as the attackers fell back. The cavalry officers got back on their horses and then, to the horror of the crowd, the order was given to put rifles to shoulders. Aaron sought out the magistrate from this distance, focused on his eyes. He saw the terror there but also the fury. ‘F-i-i-y-aah.’ The command stretched out, guns snapped spitefully, and the protesters began to go down. Shouts of ‘Run, run’ mingled with ‘Aiyo, they’ve killed me’ and shrieks of pain and anguish. Aaron took off at a dead run, Nambi close behind him. The streets of Tuticorin were unfamiliar to them, but they were young and, despite Aaron’s slightly awkward gait, speedy. They soon left all pursuit behind.

When night dropped, they’d been wandering around for what seemed like hours. They had spent the little money they had brought with them, and the invigoration of battle had long worn off. To their added dismay, they realized they had no idea where they were. Walking through a poor, rundown part of town, oil lamps flickering palely in the humid dark, Nambi spotted a woman on the stoop of a largish house. Her sari looked incongruously expensive. She contemplated the two young men with interest.

‘Don’t look at her, walk with your eyes down, she’s either a prostitute or a ghost. If she’s a prostitute we don’t have any money, and if she’s a ghost she’ll eat us alive,’ Nambi said in a hoarse whisper.

Aaron was amused by his friend’s reaction. Was this the hero of only a couple of hours ago who had fearlessly hurled stones at armed policemen? But Nambi appeared genuinely scared. Aaron followed his friend’s lead and walked past the woman with his eyes on the ground, his step quick. He thought he heard her say as they sped past, ‘Are you lost?’ His gaze turned in her direction and met beautiful anthracite eyes but Nambi tugged urgently at his sleeve and he stumbled on.

Hours later they found the railway station. They managed to climb on to a slow goods train that was headed in the right direction and dozed off. Towards dawn Aaron awoke and couldn’t go back to sleep. He sat in an open doorway, looking out at the night being peeled off the countryside. Dark smoky eyes floated in his mind for a time.