The House of Blue Mangoes (58 page)

‘He was disappointed in you, but I think he had come to accept what you did. He loved you and always wanted the best for you, you must never, ever forget that.’

There didn’t seem anything more to say, and Kannan was about to go into the house when something occurred to him.

‘One last question, mama. Was appa happy?’

‘I’d say so.’ A faint smile appeared on Ramdoss’s face. ‘The day before he left us, we went for a drive . . . Yes, he was happy.’

‘He looked very peaceful when I saw him.’

‘Yes, people do . . .’ Ramdoss looked pensive for a moment, then said, ‘Are you sure you can’t stay?’

‘No, mama, we’re short-staffed on the estate, and I couldn’t take more than a couple of days’ leave.’

‘Are things going well for you there?’

‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation, ‘I love my job, and . . . and Helen is good for me.’

‘Very well then. You must come home as often as you can. Lily-akka and I would like to see as much of you as possible. And maybe before too long you’ll be able to return here. That was one of your father’s dreams, you know.’

92

The monsoon broke with unusual severity a fortnight after Kannan got back to the estates. Since his return, he had been trying to get on with his routine, but he hadn’t reckoned with the devastating impact of his father’s death. He struggled to divert the feeling of absence and loss into something that he could understand and lay to rest. He needed to talk to someone about Daniel, but there was no one to discuss him with, least of all his wife. Ramdoss said Daniel had loved him. But if he’d loved him so much, why had he rejected him? When things were going right, love could be a great uplifting blaze, but when it soured, its potential to do damage was just as awesome. Look at how things between Helen and him stood.

Helen tried to cope with the new situation as best she could. If she was being honest, she would have to admit that her first reaction to Daniel’s death had been one of relief. One less pressure on this embattled marriage, she’d thought. Her own mother had died when she was barely two, so she didn’t have the experience to know how Daniel’s death might increase the strain on her relationship with Kannan. By dying, Daniel had drawn his son to himself. The marriage had been made more precarious. And all it took was the monsoon to reveal the strains that Daniel’s death had temporarily masked.

Helen disliked the monsoon, the clammy weather, the endless rain that marooned her in the house, the smell of drying clothes in the bathroom and the boiler room, the leaks in the house that she vainly tried to combat and the cold dark walls of mist that shut out the light. To the long list of things that she abhorred about estate life, she added the weather. Her longing to be back in Madras took on a feverish intensity. She relived cherished moments: dances at the Railway Institute with her friends, drinking thick sweet grape juice at Nair’s with Cynthia, saving up money to go to the Casino Theatre to watch Cary Grant and Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and Vivien Leigh and the gorgeous world they inhabited. When she married Kannan, she’d thought she’d acquired a version of that world. But all she had got were miserable old men and women who hated her, a husband who couldn’t defend her, and no friends.

A thud against the roof, and she began to drag herself out of the pleasant day-dream she’d been having. Jimmy and she had slipped out of Cynthia’s birthday party, desperate to kiss and explore each other’s bodies as they had recently started doing. They could never have enough of each other, and this evening had been no different, except it was Cynthia’s party, and she would have been very annoyed if Helen had left early. Around midnight, drunk and desperate with lust, Jimmy had finally cornered her in the bathroom of the house, and they had kissed each other so hard and long, it seemed they would disappear into the wall they were leaning against. Someone rattled the doorknob, there was a wild cackle of laughter not too far away and Jimmy had frantically whispered in her ear, ‘Let’s get out of here. There’ll be no one at the station. The last train has gone. We’ll get back quickly.’ She had been hesitant, she didn’t know if she’d be able to prevent him going beyond the limits she had set soon after they had started going out, but she was hungry for him and she agreed to the plan. Nobody noticed as they slipped out of the house. The station was deserted, the tracks on either side of the platform gleaming and cold in the moonlight, the porters untidy snoring heaps on the platform. The attendant had been asleep inside the second-class retiring room. They had woken him up, and Jimmy had slipped him six annas. Sleepy and grumbling, he had opened up the first-class waiting room with its deep wickerwork planter’s chairs and solid teak table and cupboards. The door had scarcely shut behind him before they were clasped together . . .

The branch thudded against the roof again, and Helen looked at Kannan with a little alarm. The weather had been terrible throughout the night, thunder rolling continuously and lightning whitening the world. The creaking and rumbling in the house had kept them both awake, and the morning had brought no relief. The lawn was a lake. Virtually every plant and shrub had been smashed flat to the ground. Kannan hadn’t been able to go to work for the second day in a row, and after breakfast they had adjourned to the living room, where they had sat, each absorbed in their thoughts, occasionally looking out of the window.

There was a loud crash. The old gum tree by the hedge had been uprooted. Fortunately, it had fallen away from the house into the tea. It was gusting so hard now that it was actually raining upward, the pelting rain interrupted in its downward passage by errant rills of wind which then bore it aloft, until a dense scurf of rain formed in mid-air; the knots of rain would last a brief moment, then dissolve, only to form again.

Lightning flickered soundlessly on the bare rock-face across the valley and the wind threatened to rip the roof off. Cold hard fists of rain slammed against the window. Kannan had never seen anything like it in his time in the hills. He wondered if the house would hold up. If the roof blew away, how would they get to safety? The gum tree had blocked the road. And even if they cleared that obstacle, he wasn’t sure he could keep the motorcycle upright in the storm.

Towards lunch the weather grew calmer. Although the rain still crashed down, the wind had abated, and the thunder and lightning had moved away. The butler entered, announced lunch and went to see to its serving.

‘I want to get rid of Manickam. He’s a thief, and he’s dirty. He coughs as though he has TB.’ They were the first words she had spoken all morning.

‘But why? Whoever you get will be worse. At least Manickam knows our whims and the bungalow like the back of his hand.’

‘Exactly. He acts like he’s the master of the house.’

‘What? Has he been rude to you?’

‘Not exactly, but you know how these things are . . .’

He thought he knew what she was getting at. She had been angry with Manickam ever since Lily’s stay in Pulimed. But that was no reason to get rid of him.

‘What are you trying to say, Hen?’ he said patiently. He didn’t feel patient at all, but it was better this way, otherwise he knew exactly how the sequence of events would go – minor skirmishing would lead to bigger issues and then there would be an outright fight. He had begun to hate the time they spent together. You never knew when a furious argument would break out, angry thoughts and words creeping like dirty little animals from her angelic mouth.

Often when they fought, he would simply walk out into the rain, preferring the leeches and the wet to his cantankerous wife. He would have to sort out Helen’s unhappiness somehow, he realized, and quickly, otherwise they should go their separate ways. That wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider lightly, especially because admission of defeat in his marriage would be a massive blow to his pride, and Kannan was a proud man, but more and more it seemed the only way out . . . She could leave when the weather improved, in September or in December. A few months in the plains would settle her, give him the space he needed to get over his father’s death. And then perhaps they could start again.

Helen was screeching at him now, ‘Kannan, hullooo, are you listening to me? Here I am, trying to bring something to your notice, and you seem to have gone wool-gathering! As usual! If only you’d take a look at how things really are, what we have to put up with here, then we wouldn’t be leading such miserable lives.’

He tried hard to maintain his composure, to no avail. He reacted angrily. ‘Now look here, nothing is as dire as you make it out to be. Just because some people are against you, just because you haven’t been able to get the planters to swoon at your feet, then that is no reason to be hard on me. You’re not one of them, and never will be, no matter how much you try.’

Helen’s response was instant and splenetic.

‘How dare you talk to me like that, you no-good beggar. Don’t you see how they treat you? Every time I see you smiling and fawning on them, running around to do their every little errand, it makes me want to vomit. Don’t you have any self-respect?’

‘What are you saying, you pathetic woman? Don’t forget that if it wasn’t for me you would still be hanging around in your awful little colony . . .’

‘You miserable worm, if you had the guts you would stand up to these white buggers, instead of taking your resentment out on me. You Indians are all cowards, no wonder you bootlick so much.’

‘Are you English? Is that why you are so miserable when the white man spits on you?’ he said quietly.

Helen’s face grew angrier. It’s amazing how even the most perfect features take on a simian cast when angry, Kannan thought. At times like this we resemble nothing so much as the apes that preceded us.

Helen, who had been struggling to get the words out, began to scream at him. ‘I hate you, I hate the day I let you into my life, I hate the day I married you, I hate you, I hate you, you miserable pariah.’

‘If I am a pariah, what do you think that makes you?’

‘Someone who’ll always be a thousand times better than you . . .’

‘Oh really, and how’s that, you stupid little fool?’

‘Simple. Does anyone know the great Kannan Dorai’s ancestry? Do you know how much your white colleagues would despise you if they knew?’

He didn’t know where this was going, but it felt bad . . .

‘Who are you to look down on me, you bastard, when your own mother, the great lady who can’t even speak English, is nothing but a head clerk’s daughter?’

The words dropped like thunder. Even in their most bitter fights, they’d refrained from attacking each other’s parents but Helen’s rage was all-consuming. An image bloomed in Kannan’s mind of his mother, the calm centre in the midst of the frenzy that had attended Daniel’s death. How noble she’d seemed. And to have her spat on!

Helen’s face looked almost comical when she realized what she’d done. She jumped up from the sofa, but Kannan was quicker. He got up from his chair, propelled by a fury so great that he barely registered his physical actions. He caught her, his fist raised to smash down into her face, to erase from his sight something that had suddenly grown hateful. At the last moment, diverted by the terror in her eyes, he pushed her from him and slammed his fist into the wooden mantelpiece. The hard unyielding teak absorbed the blow, the lone Wedgwood vase on it barely stirring. Weeping, Helen fled the room and Kannan slumped into a sofa, the future pitilessly clear. They were finished.

He moved into the spare bedroom that night and Helen didn’t try to stop him.

All through that monsoon, they kept as far away from each other as they could manage, speaking to each other only when absolutely necessary, waiting for the moment when they could escape each other. When the rains thinned in September, land-slips blocked the road to the plains. Finally, towards the middle of December, the rains gone, he drove her down to the station to catch her train. Their parting was perfunctory. He promised to send her things on as quickly as he could and they made polite talk about getting back together in a while, although they were careful to keep their plans vague.

Soon afterwards he wrote to Murthy, asking his friend to fulfil a long-standing promise to visit.

93

The decisive victory of the Fourteenth Army at the siege of Imphal was the worst defeat the Japanese had suffered since the Battle of Midway in 1942. It was Britain’s greatest triumph in the region. The war began to recede from India. By the winter of 1944, enormous fleets of American Super-Fortress bombers took the war to Japan itself, a country that had believed itself under divine protection ever since the thirteenth century when the savage Mongol armies of Kubla Khan were scattered by great winds when they threatened the islands; this time, however, kamikaze, the divine wind, failed to protect Japan. Hundreds of B-29s under the command of Curtis Le May began to pound the country. The attacks generated firestorms that raised temperatures in the city to 1800ºF and above.

As news of Allied victories filtered through, a mood of exultation grew in the estates. An invasion of little yellow men was no longer feared and the planters celebrated. In this corner of the planet, the war was over.

Even the weather gave cause for cheer. December was usually cold and gloomy, but this year the bright blade of the sun sliced through the mists, the temperature rose, and the high tea country became a place of enchantment. Everywhere you looked, the landscape was so green it hurt the eye. The sky was blue and unclouded, and the air so clear that every feature of the land stood out in sharp relief. After six months of rain, the world breathed again. It was a time of parties and picnics and serious bouts of drinking before roaring fires of eucalyptus wood.

Murthy arrived in Pulimed in December and Kannan swept his friend into a whirl of partying and clubbing. After three days, Murthy had had enough. On Sunday morning he asked whether they might not stay home for the day.

‘It’s been over two years since I last saw you, do you mind very much if we spend today catching up?’ he asked.