A Grand Entry,A Grand Entry
The House Of Blue Mangoes is a conventional novel – more like a nineteenth century classic – where you are attracted more by its superb story-telling technique than any other tool. At one level, it may seem like an old-fashioned work, but given the subject it deals – story of a South Indian family through three generations – conventional style was perhaps the unavoidable one, and it is apt too.
Irrespective of how and what one writes, it is perhaps life – in its different forms and modes - that constitute the stuff of real fiction. Going by it, Solomon, Daniel and Kannan – the representatives of three generations – rivet us by their actions and thoughts, which are markers of their times.
Chevathar is where Solomon is born and die. His world is limited to, and never extends beyond it. But his son Daniel leaves the place, receives his medical education, and makes his name and fortune as a medical practitioner elsewhere. Readers are pleasingly jolted when Daniel returns to his birth-place leaving his lucrative practice. His builds an enormous palacial abode and settlement of a colony with near and distant relations of the Dorai family as a testament to his father’s memory. This is the best Daniel could have offered.
Kannan, Daniel’s son, is a modern man. His attitude is of course different from his father’s. One who would like to have a feel of the big world, he dares out of his community, marries an Anglo-Indian girl despite his family’s strong opposition and takes a planter’s job in a tea garden in Pulimed, far away from home. His father dies unhappily knowing that Kannan would never be at the helm of his affairs. Kannan’s wife leaves him after a bitter stand-off. One day he loses charm and attraction in his planter’s life and finds himself heading back to Chevathar, to live there permanently.
So Chevathar is the link, sustenance, and in a way, the destiny of each of three characters. Solomon lived all his life here because his world constituted of this place alone. Daniel came back to live here because he considered it, somewhat impulsively, his roots. For Kannan, Chevathar was a conscious decision, and he was left with no other option. For each new generation, Chevathar takes on a new meaning, but it is the ultimate destination and solace for all of three representatives in the end. It is as if they all come back by an irresitable pull, but one cannot escape the understated tragedy of the fallibility of the characters. Davidar has successfully created a great, memorable and haunting place out of Chevathar.
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