The House of Blue Mangoes (46 page)

‘Amma, do you know Murthy?’ Kannan was standing before her with his friend.

‘Yes, I do. You introduced him to me just before the service.’

‘So I did, how forgetful of me.’ Kannan looked happy and flustered and young, and her heart went out to him. May you and your bride be happy, she murmured to herself. My prayers and thoughts will always be with you.

Soon it was time for her to go. As the car taking his mother and her relatives pulled away, Kannan felt a momentary sadness. There would be no celebrations at Doraipuram. And then a wave of anger rose within him. If his people didn’t care enough about him to overcome their misgivings, he wouldn’t let that affect him.

After his mother had gone, Murthy and Kannan stood together, feeling a little left out of the proceedings. The party careened on as madly as before.

‘These people really know how to have a good time,’ Murthy said.

‘Exactly what I was thinking. I don’t think we fellows can keep up,’ Kannan replied with a laugh. The music flowing from expertly strummed guitars and crashing maracas rose to a crescendo and blotted out any further idea of conversation. Cynthia whirled Murthy away, and Kannan hurried up to his bride. She smiled at him and the world reassembled itself into perfect order.

As the party intensified, old ladies, dumpy in crumpled frocks, took to the makeshift dance floor. Demonstrating an astonishing agility and quickness of step that belied their age, they waltzed and foxtrotted, twirling like faded parasols with partners as ancient as themselves in threadbare if neatly pressed jackets. Handsome boys practised being studiedly cool as they partnered brightly apparelled, noisy girls who were as self-conscious as the boys.

At midnight, the festivities showed no signs of abating. Leslie had retreated to his favourite armchair and lolled comfortably in it. ‘She’ll fix you, son. Now that she doesn’t have to keep me honest,’ he said to Kannan with a loud bellow of laughter. Helen pretended to glare at her father, and Kannan smiled.

He had wanted to leave for Pulimed immediately after the wedding but it took four days for Helen to say goodbye to all her friends, including, Kannan noted sourly, virtually the entire Railways hockey team. He tried his best to keep up with her, valiantly drinking rum by the glassful and even allowing himself to be persuaded to dance on one occasion. By the evening of the third day, however, he’d had enough of partying, and busied himself instead with preparations for their journey.

Lily had given him some money as a wedding present, and by combining this with his scanty savings, he had scraped together enough to buy a motorcycle, the essential accessory of every young Assistant on the estates. He managed to get an imposing Norton, the king of motorcycles, for a good price. On the test drive, Kannan had enjoyed the feel of the machine, although the crowded Madras streets weren’t the best place to get a sense of its power. That could wait until it was delivered to Pulimed.

At the railway station, where he had gone to confirm their tickets, he heard worrying news. Terrorist activity was anticipated on the Madras–Madura line, and there was a possibility that the train would be cancelled. Kannan was frantic. He’d only been granted a week’s leave and they had to get to Madura on schedule. No guarantees, the stationmaster said firmly. Come tomorrow and check. Disconsolately Kannan motored home. As he left Madras Central Station, he saw a slogan emblazoned in foot-high letters on the wall of the building across the road:

THE BRITISH HAVE GONE TO WAR

TO PROTECT THE WORLD’S FREEDOM!

And below that:

WHY CAN’T THEY GIVE US OUR FREEDOM?

The last line was familiar:

QUIT INDIA!

By early 1944, most of the Congress leadership had been imprisoned by the British. But the agitation and demands for freedom continued. In the hills, however, all the planters seemed to care about was the war. It was as if the nationalist ferment was just a minor irrelevancy. India intruded, if at all, in the shape of the servants that every memsahib commanded; in the bearers and tennis markers at the clubs; the wretched coolies and tea-pluckers in the fields; the tea-makers and the factory workers. The more bigoted and uncaring planters could scarcely distinguish one from the other. Everything proclaimed the supremacy of the rulers – the princely bungalows with vast gardens and manicured lawns for the couples from Basingstoke or Dartford, the determined imposition of a rather overblown Englishness on the rhythms of India. What would happen to all this if nationalism suddenly rose up and swallowed everything? Kannan hoped revolution would hold off for a bit, though. He had to get to Madura tomorrow.

When they arrived at the station, they were relieved to find that their train was to leave on time. It was the first time they had been alone together, if you discounted the others in their second-class compartment – Leslie had pulled some strings to get them into a relatively empty compartment. Kannan was nervous all over again. He needn’t have been, for Helen was so exhausted from all the partying she had done that she promptly fell asleep and did not wake up until the train reached Madura.

Michael’s Humber and driver, on loan for the journey home, were waiting at the station when they arrived. Kannan wondered whether they should see the one obligatory sight the town offered, the Meenakshi temple, before they left, especially as he’d never managed to see it the couple of times he had passed through Madura. In the end, they decided to drive by it. They parked the Humber by the side of the road, ousting four cows, and gazed up at the intricately designed southern gopuram, the most imposing of the gateways of the temple. Helen soon tired of this, but Kannan was sucked into the mass of sculpture and design that writhed across the stone, even though he didn’t understand the mythological implications and, moreover, had little or no interest in religion or art. What effort must have gone into the hundreds of thousands of carvings! Kannan felt a sudden desire to know what his life would be devoted to, what his life’s work would be. Would he make his mark on the world that he had been plunged into? Would his exquisite bride be proud of him? He was young and strong and he had a lifetime to find out. But now was no time for philosophizing; he was impatient to show his bride his world.

74

The drive back to the estate was everything Kannan could have hoped for. No sooner had they left the brawling heat of the plains behind, than the hills began to place their enchantments before them. Forests quiet with rain, and valleys where clouds came to rest. A huge grey rock-face on which dozens of waterfalls unravelled like dirty white yarn, next to a piney hillside awash with great swatches of pink and yellow roses. The mossy smell, the hills helmeted with tea or forest, the sound of running water, the fresh cold breeze on their faces – every sense was pleasantly assaulted, all at once. They stopped for lunch by an ice-cold stream in which pale fish flickered like random thoughts. ‘Oh Kannan, this is so beautiful, I’m so very happy,’ Helen said ecstatically. Across from where they sat, a small rain had begun to fall while the sun still shone, dusting the hillside with a million glittering shards of light. ‘So, so beautiful,’ she breathed.

‘You’ll love the house too,’ he said, so delighted by her exhilaration that the nervousness he felt at being alone with her disappeared. At least for a while. They stopped just once after lunch, to take in the view. As they got out of the car, Pulimed lay before them. It was a sunny day, and every detail of its beauty was sharply etched, though the mist had already begun smoking out of the crevices and crags of the hills, streaming across the tea bushes that democratically massed on every slope as far as the eye could see. Even as they watched, the world blurred, the tea, the hills, the tiny human settlements gradually disappearing into the watery maw of the mist, until all that remained was the occasional lake or tin-roofed factory gleaming like a polished silver incisor.

They reached Morningfall bungalow to which Kannan had moved barely a month ago, when he had been promoted to Assistant. As the Humber drew into the driveway, Helen reached across and gripped Kannan’s hand tightly, her eyes gleaming with excitement. ‘This is where we’re going to live?’ she gasped. He nodded.

The bungalow stood in a little clearing hacked out of a hill. Tall eucalyptus trees, their trunks grey and ghostly in the evening light, fringed the front garden, beyond which the hill fell away steeply. Against a backdrop of tea, hollyhocks nodded their heads in the breeze. Petunias, gerberas, camellias and phlox coloured the garden. Crag martins swooped and soared through the darkening air.

Helen jumped out of the car and hurried into the house, barely acknowledging the four servants who were waiting outside, hands folded in deep namaskarams. She gazed entranced around the living room with its deep bay windows commanding an extraordinary view of the valley. It was the size of the house, however, and its profusion of rooms that amazed her. What a distance she had travelled, she thought, from the grubby three-room houses in a succession of government colonies!

She had dreamed of marrying someone who could spirit her overseas to live the life of a memsahib but her imagination could never quite put colours and shapes into that dream. But this! She could touch, feel, see it, and it was hers. She fell to dreaming of the parties she would throw in the living room with its comfortable armchairs, its wine-red carpet, the matching drapes. It was all so rich, so confident. She couldn’t bear it, she was so happy.

‘Do you like it?’ Kannan said behind her. She whirled around to face him. And then spontaneously caught him up in a tremendous embrace. ‘I love it,’ she shrieked.

Disentangling herself from him, she raced from the sitting room into the passage, darted into the spare bedroom, their own bedroom, buried her face in the soft furry towels in the bathroom and then whirled into the dining room with its shiny polished teak table that could seat eight. A long roofed corridor connected the main house with the kitchen and the servants’ quarters beyond.

By Pulimed’s standards, Morningfall was a small bungalow, but it was more magnificent than anything she had ever seen.

‘Did you do it up yourself?’ she asked.

‘No, no, don’t be silly. Belinda has wonderful taste, and she was most helpful.’

‘Who is Belinda?’ his wife asked him.

‘Is she some gorgeous English rose who has seduced my darling Kannan?’

He made an inarticulate noise, then managed to speak. ‘No, no, nothing like that, she’s the Superintendent’s wife, Mrs Fraser.’

‘Of course, silly,’ she said, pouting. She didn’t really care who Belinda was, although she expected she would have to, now. ‘Are the Frasers nice?’

‘Yes, very,’ he said. ‘They’re having us over to tea on Sunday.’

‘I’d love that,’ she said. Real posh English people. And their bungalow must be even grander than hers. And she, Helen Turner of Tambaram, sitting and sipping tea with them like a proper English lady. She couldn’t wait.

All at once she was overcome with the immensity of it all, the suddenness with which her life had been transformed, the speed with which things were happening.

When she was a little girl of maybe three or four, her father had decided to take her with him to work. She had been suitably impressed by the machines that whirred and spat out words like magic, but she had soon grown bored and Leslie had taken her off to the shunting yard, where he had arranged with friends to give his daughter a ride in an engine. Helen had clung to her father as they walked along the railway tracks, the noise and the confusion of the yard unnerving her. Massive black locomotives idled past like reflective whales, scarcely showing any of the strength and power they were capable of when they built up a head of steam.

‘Over here, men,’ her father’s friend Uncle Kenny had shouted, leaning out of the locomotive that was puffing past, waving a red handkerchief that he often wore knotted around his neck to keep it from becoming encrusted with soot. A tortured squealing of brakes, locking wheels and roaring steam and the engine had groaned to a halt. Leslie had hoisted her up to Kenny, pulled himself up into the cab of the locomotive and the two men had grinned down at the nervous little girl. ‘This is what Daddy’s friend does! Want to go for a ride?’ Uncle Kenny had said, while her father had nodded encouragingly.

The fireman, his face begrimed with soot and sweat, had said to her father, ‘Pretty girl, Mr Turner.’

‘Yes, Helen will make the boys turn cartwheels in a few years. Won’t you, darling?’

It was incredibly hot and noisy in the locomotive’s cab. The fire in the boiler leapt about like a great restless eye. The men were shouting above the noise and vibration – so intense it seemed it would split the thick iron frame of the engine apart. Uncle Kenny gestured and one of the men reached up and pulled the whistle cord. An enormous shriek ripped through the tangle of noise, and with a pronounced shudder the locomotive began to move. The experience had been so powerful that every detail of that morning had been imprinted on her mind, down to the little black smudge that her father had given her, right on the tip of her nose, as a parting present. ‘You’re all growed up, Helen darling,’ he had said proudly, ‘now that you’ve experienced my world.’

Even though she was nineteen now, a hard-bitten, experienced nineteen as she liked to think, she felt exactly the same way as she had felt that day – hardly able to believe the evidence of her eyes, unable to comprehend the difference, the alienness, of this world. It was something that she had yearned for, and now that it had suddenly yielded to her, she didn’t quite know how to take it. And before her was the architect of all this – the person she had once disdained. She smiled at him.

75

That night, after the servants had tidied everything away and gone to their quarters, Kannan and Helen retired to their bedroom. Washed and changed, Helen in a full-length blue nightgown, Kannan in striped pyjamas, they sat on the bed without speaking or touching, looking into the fire with a not unpleasant excitement. The minutes passed. Kannan saw his wife (he had tried the word over and over again since they had married) smile and smiled back. He had no idea what to do, especially as his father or Ramdoss hadn’t been around to explain a few things. The only previous sexual experience he could call upon was the mysterious thrill he’d felt when he and his gang had sneaked up on servant girls at home as they bathed in the Chevathar. Leslie had provided some advice that seemed useful, but had abruptly broken off his narrative. ‘Can’t tell you any more, young fellow. My daughter, you understand. But I’m sure all you young chaps know what to do once you’re married, eh. Much more than we fellas used to know in our time.’ Leslie had wandered away, and Kannan was left feeling as confused as before. How, he thought to himself, was he to convert the fantasy figure that Helen had been for so long into something human? Someone he could touch, be intimate with, cherish, make love to? He shrank from the prospect.