The House of Blue Mangoes (36 page)

Unable to move his family on the issue, Daniel had to content himself with a minor consolation prize. From this day onwards his immediate family would drop its caste suffix, Andavar. ‘If you want to be tied down by your caste affiliation, I respect your wish,’ he declared to the council of elders, ‘but I have a great desire to be free!’ The final item on the agenda was the naming of the settlement. Daniel was inclined to let it remain an anonymous part of Chevathar but Ramdoss stepped in again: ‘The world needs to find us, anna. We need a name.’ Daniel was immediately persuaded. They named their colony Doraipuram.

A month after they moved to Chevathar, Lily gave birth to their third child, a boy. No strange stars appeared in the skies, no poisonous snakes spread their hoods over him, none of his organs – nose, ears, eyes, throat, penis, head – were abnormal, and he possessed no extraordinary powers or faculties, but the settlers were overjoyed. This was most propitious. Especially as the child was the son Daniel had always craved. Forty-one days after the baby was born, the family visited the church for the infant to be blessed. Daniel had a name ready for his son, one he’d thought of a while ago. He had toyed with the idea of bestowing it upon his daughters, but Lily had been opposed to the idea and he’d given in. This time, surprisingly enough, the resistance came from Charity, whose involvement in family matters, while greater than before, wasn’t yet strong. ‘Too unchristian,’ she’d muttered when Daniel asked her what she thought of the name Thirumoolar, one of the greatest siddha saints. But this time he was determined to have his way, and the baby was baptized with the name. However, it was Charity who ultimately prevailed. Kannan, her nickname for the baby, soon became the only name he responded to. Within months, the only person who called him by his given name was his father.

The baby revitalized Charity, consuming all her time and energy. As soon as he was weaned, he seemed to take up permanent station on his grandmother’s hip. He went with her everywhere – to the kitchen, where she began to supervise, as she had done many years before, the cooking of enormous meals, for long walks through the mango groves and gardens of Doraipuram. They became a familiar sight – the diminutive old lady dressed all in white, with the enormous baby on her hip (so large in fact that she had to lean all the way over to keep her balance). She crooned lullabies to put him to sleep and sang songs to make him eat. The song he seemed to like best was a little ditty about blue mangoes:

Saapudu kannu saapudu

Eat my beloved eat

Neela mangavai saapudu

Eat the blue mango

Onaku enna kavalai

You have no cares or worries

Azhakana mangavai saapudu

All you need do is eat the beautiful mango

Parisutha maana devadhuta

Angels from the heavens above

Un ulakathai kaaval

Watch over your world

Saapudu kannu saapudu

Eat my beloved eat

Neela mangavai saapudu

Eat the blue mango

At first Lily was put out by Charity’s obsession with her baby boy. But over time she grew reconciled to it, and even welcomed it. Kannan was not only a powerful restorative for her mother-in-law; the fact that he had Charity looking after him virtually every waking moment gave her the time she required to meet the constantly expanding needs of Neelam Illum.

Having refound his family, Daniel would go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy its every whim. The fifty-eight rooms, most of which were converted into makeshift bedrooms within months of their moving in, were almost always full of relatives. In addition, there were children, ranging in age from five to fifteen, who had been entrusted to Daniel the moment he had volunteered to take care of some need or other. Lily and Charity, when she wasn’t preoccupied with Kannan, supervised the cooking of meals and other domestic arrangements for nearly a hundred people every day.

56

‘Do you really believe the Chevathar Neelam is the best mango in the world?’ Daniel asked Ramdoss.

‘I believe it’s the best I’ve eaten.’

‘I wonder what makes it so remarkable,’ Daniel said thoughtfully.

‘Could it be the soil?’

‘Probably. But certainly there was some grafting done a long time ago.’

It was the summer of Daniel’s second year in Doraipuram and Ramdoss and he were supervising the harvest of blue mangoes. It was four in the morning, the time at which the Chevathar Neelams were traditionally picked to ensure their sweetness was retained, and that they ripened evenly.

‘I’d like to decide for myself,’ Daniel said abruptly.

‘Decide what?’ Ramdoss asked.

‘That the Chevathar Neelam is the best mango in the world.’

In his years with Daniel, Ramdoss had learned that when his brother-in-law was enthused by a new idea it was very hard to deflect him. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asked.

Daniel didn’t reply for a while, silently watching the men harvesting the mangoes flit like ghosts through the pre-dawn hush, gently picking the fruit with what looked like giant butterfly nets and depositing them in cane baskets filled with straw.

‘I’d like to taste the finest mangoes available to satisfy myself that the Chevathar Neelam is the best!’

Ramdoss’s heart sank. The time, the cost, the travel! ‘But, anna, Doraipuram needs your guiding hand, we can’t wander the world tasting mangoes.’

‘India has the world’s greatest mangoes, there’s no need to leave its shores. I’ve always wanted to eat Alphonsos, Langdas, Chausas and Maldas. There’s no point trying to make me change my mind, Ramdoss, it’s made up and we’re going.’

He was as good as his word. The great mango yatra began in Kerala, where Daniel, Ramdoss and the four gardeners who made up the party tasted the Ollour, a fruit with thick yellow skin and flesh and a faintly resinous after-taste. It was a fruit they were all familiar with, as it was found in the bazaars of Nagercoil and Meenakshikoil.

As summer progressed, dozens of varieties of mangoes began to ripen. The group from Doraipuram trailed through the fruit markets of the south, making the acquaintance of many well-known mangoes such as the regal Jehangiri, named for an emperor, the Banganapalli with its sweet, pale, whitish-yellow pulp, and the rare and delicious Himayuddin with a taste in the upper registers of the palate. In the fruit markets of Madura, they ate Rumanis round as cricket balls and so thin-skinned a baby could peel them, Mulgoas so enormous that they often tipped the scales at three kilograms and the highly prized Cherukurasam.

Then they had to hurry west, for the fruiting season of the Alphonso was at its peak. Deciding that it was not practical to journey to Ratnagiri, Bulsad and Belgaum, where the celebrated Alphonso orchards perfumed the air, even infusing the rice paddies, they headed instead for Bombay. Straight off the train, they made for Crawford Market. Long before they caught sight of the country’s most famous mango, they could smell it, its scent rising above the odours of rotting cabbage and corn, sweat and kerosene. They turned a corner and suddenly there they were – row upon row of gilded Alphonsos arranged in tiers behind gesticulating, yelling mango traders and their equally vociferous customers. Daniel ate his first Alphonso, and as the taste – a touch of tartness, a spill of honey, a profusion of fresh, light notes on a deep bass foundation – sank into his palate he understood why it was so coveted. He would have liked to have lingered longer in the west, but there was still much ground to cover during the short season, and they were soon on a train heading east, their last memory of the great western mangoes being a glass of juice, thick and sweet as clarified sunlight, made from that other classic, the Pairi.

As they made their journeys, Daniel steeped himself in mango lore. He discovered that the mango grew nearly everywhere on the subcontinent and that there were over a thousand recognized varieties. Ramdoss successfully dissuaded his friend from even thinking about sampling them all, suggesting instead that for practical reasons they limit themselves to the most renowned. He learned that
Mangifera indica
, to give it its proper name, had evolved somewhere in the mysterious northeastern corner of the country over two thousand years before, and had been spread by travellers and other carriers throughout Southeast Asia, China and the Malay archipelago. Greedy Portuguese traders and adventurers were the first pale skins to encounter it in the early years of the sixteenth century. Immediately falling under its spell, they had introduced the fruit to Africa and South America. About the same time, it had travelled by another route to the West Indies, the Philippines and thence to Mexico. In the nineteenth century, it had appeared in the orchards of California, Florida and Hawaii.

Everywhere they travelled, there were fascinating stories about the fruit, a delicacy so prized among connoisseurs that it drove its admirers to all sorts of excess. The Mughal Emperor Akbar’s romance with the mango made even the Dorais’ obsession with it pale in comparison. Never one to do things by halves, he had ordered an army of malis to raise an orchard of a hundred thousand trees in Darbhanga. Even more dedicated to the cause of the fruit was the Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Lucknow who was fêted throughout the land for the excellence of his mango orchards where nearly thirteen hundred varieties were raised; the prince’s mango marriages were famous, as were his mango parties where, to the sound of tabla and santoor, the nobility gathered in pavilions constructed in the orchards, and tasted mangoes plucked from trees by women specially selected for their long tapering fingers, the better to grasp the fruit.

They spent a week in the east acquainting themselves with the finer points of the Malda, also called the Bombay Green, which had a subtle taste that seemed almost anaemic until it expanded to fill the senses. They sampled the exceedingly sweet, thin-skinned Himsagar and the Bombai, not to be confused with the Bombay Green. And Daniel was thrilled to be invited to a mango-tasting festival by an ageing Murshidabad nawab. Graciously inviting his guests to take their places at the head table, the Nawab showed Daniel how he ate the fruit. He first munched on a spicy, coarsely ground kabab so that his palate was completely fresh and then delicately picked at a little of the heart flesh of the Gulabkhas, a mango that tasted of roses. ‘Truly, an unusual way to eat the fruit,’ Daniel remarked to Ramdoss. ‘Why didn’t we think of something like that?’

They had one other major mango-growing region to visit before the long journey home. Daniel had heard a lot about the Malihabadi Dussehri, and when he tasted it, he was quick to accept its claims to greatness. But he discovered that its claim to being the finest mango in the country was by no means secure, for there were those who would bestow that honour on the Langda, which according to legend was first grown by a lame fakir from the holy city of Benares. When Daniel encountered it, he was overwhelmed by its qualities – the pale green skin, the orange-yellow flesh and above all the taste: a distinctive sweetness balanced by a slight tartness. They decided not to wait for the late-fruiting Chausa to arrive in the markets: Ramdoss managed to persuade Daniel to abandon his plans to visit Lahore and Rangoon and they took the train home. On the way back, Daniel discussed the dozens of varieties they had tasted. He referred to the notes he’d made, he recalled their distinctive qualities, and he tried as fairly as he could to determine the greatest mango he had encountered in the course of his yatra.

A week after he’d returned to Doraipuram, Daniel still couldn’t pick the winner. That evening, when he and Ramdoss took their daily walk, he said, ‘You know, Ramu, we’ve spent months trying to find out whether the Chevathar Neelam is finer than any other mango.’

‘Yes,’ Ramdoss said cautiously. But Daniel didn’t pick up the conversation for he was lost in a reverie. He saw himself reach up to pick a Chevathar Neelam from his father’s orchard, the fruit invested with the golden light of the sun. He tore at the warm fragrant skin with his teeth, then bit down into the flesh, the nectar running in yellow rivulets down his face, neck, even his arms, its unmatched flavour overwhelming him. ‘Ramu,’ Daniel said slowly, ‘we went a long way to know what I’ve always known. There’s no question that the Chevathar Neelam is the greatest mango in the world.’ Then, to Ramdoss’s disquiet, he added, ‘Now that we know that, we need to proclaim its glories far and wide.’

As always when in the grip of an obsession, Dr Dorai worked single-mindedly in pursuit of his objective. He lavished money and attention on the mango topes, enriching the soil, guarding against common diseases and infestations. Startled stem-borers and mango hoppers, shoot-borers and blossom midges died by the thousand as an army of gardeners attacked them, with their bare hands if necessary.

By the time the next fruiting season came round, Daniel was ready to inaugurate Doraipuram’s first Blue Mango Festival. The finest mangoes had already been carefully harvested and left to ripen in enormous storerooms at the rear of Neelam Illum. On the appointed day they were taken from the densely scented rooms and carried to the pandal that had been erected on the banks of the Chevathar. For the celebrations, Daniel had copied many details from the mango-tasting ceremony he had attended in Murshidabad, but there were some touches that were unique.

He had commissioned the legendary weavers of the region to weave a hundred mats with a special mango pattern, and these covered the red earth of the river bank. The Collector, who was the chief guest (the Murshidabad nawab had been unable to make the journey), sat at the head table along with Daniel, Ramdoss, Narasimhan, other local dignitaries and the heads of the founding families. A band played soft music and lamps lit the mango groves. As the heart flesh of the Neelam was ceremoniously served on small plates, each guest munched first on a hot vadai (a variant that Daniel was rather proud of) before tasting the fruit. Once the formal tasting of the Neelam was over, other varieties were presented, seventy-seven in all. The Collector gave up after tasting twenty-two types of mango, Narasimhan managed twelve more, and only Daniel and Ramdoss tasted them all.