The Vicks Mango Tree

By Anees Salim

A few months after a state of Emergency has been clamped on India, Raj Iyer, a fledgling journalist living in the alley of the Vicks mango tree, goes underground, to resurface some years later in a corner of the Municipal Park as a bronze statue. No one's sure exactly why he has become so famous, though there is talk of a book being written on him, which hails him as a modern hero of Mangobaag. The Vicks Mango Tree is the story of the tiny fictional region of Mangobaag -- and India -- as she limps through twenty-one months of suspended civil liberties, half-hearted revolts and stern censorships. It is also the tale of Teacher Bhatt, Rabia Sheik and Shankar Iyer, ordinary people in pursuit of their middle-class dreams, and local legends like Maharaja Muneer Shah, Miss Myna and Dr Abid Ali, who live and die in the dying light of a glorious past. Full of odd characters and piquant situations, and alive with the politics and possibilities of a not-so-long-ago time in India's history, The Vicks Mango Tree is a compelling first novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9789350295489

Anees Salim

Anees Salim is rather proud of being a dropout. He joined advertising in the late 1990s, and has been working on a variety of brands for the past fourteen years. He currently heads the creative department of Draft FCB Ulka, Kochi, where he started his career as a trainee copywriter. He loves being invisible, and shares his time between home and office.

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Prologue, 1977

T

railing the road roller, the man from the second-hand bookstore came up the alley, walking pompously behind the rattling machine like he owned it. Had Teacher Bhatt not remembered him from his visit to the bookstore a week ago, he would have mistaken him for the owner of the road roller, someone whose fortune depended on the construction boom along the skyline of Mangobaag.

At the entrance to Bava House, the man hesitated for a moment, then he went quickly in, as if sucked in by the enormous silence of the tenement. Teacher Bhatt heard him on the wooden steps, stamping his way past empty flats to the third floor where he once had the hero of Mangobaag as his neighbour.

His neighbour had only recently hit the headlines. But Mangobaag had been in the news even before the Morning Herald, the city’s first newspaper, started rolling out a sandcoloured daily nearly a century ago. If fruits came with labels of their origin, the finest varieties of mango in the subcontinent would have borne the name of this city. But the meteoric rise of Mangobaag’s hero has nothing to do with these mangoes. He neither made a living out of them nor died fighting for them.

The man from the bookstore announced his arrival with a long ring of the doorbell. Answering it, Teacher Bhatt found the visitor standing with his back to him, facing the door, which was painted a shocking purple. As if his rear side were his business card.

‘Yes?’ Teacher Bhatt pretended to be too busy with life to remember the man from his visit to the bookstore.

‘I am from the bookstore. You said you had some books to sell.’

‘Ah, yes, I have some books to dispose of. You can come in.’ He had one hundred and sixty-one books to sell, collected over thirty-two years and stored in four soap cartons which were stacked in a corner of his bedroom. He was foregoing them only because he was leaving the city, and had decided to travel light. With three suitcases and a bedroll.

‘Who lives there now?’ the man asked as he came in, pointing a finger at the purple door across the landing.

‘No one,’ Teacher Bhatt said impatiently. He didn’t like questions. But when he answered them, he answered in detail. A habit that had survived his teaching days. ‘This building has been sold. All the tenants are gone. I am leaving soon. You saw a road roller parked in the alley? Once I am gone, bulldozers will raze this building to the ground. And the road roller will level the ground.’ He imagined the debris flattening like dough under the big wheel. ‘Follow me.’

Teacher Bhatt walked the man down the narrow corridor and led him into the bedroom lit by the 12 o’clock sun. ‘The building has been sold for a good price,’ he said as a footnote, suggesting in a roundabout way that nothing in Bava House, including the books in the soap cartons, was meant for inferior commerce.

The man went to the corner where the cartons sat, tiny circles of light resting on them like silver coins. He knelt gingerly by the cartons, as if ruminating over picking up the coins and slipping them into his pocket when the owner of the books was not looking. Teacher Bhatt saw these sovereigns of light every morning, in the alley under the mango tree, on the sill of his bedroom windows, sometimes in a loose spoor down the stairway—they had long ceased to look like money.

The man picked up a hardbound book from a carton and gave it a testing slap against his palm. He plunged into a fit of sneezing almost immediately. Impervious to the clouds of dust, Teacher Bhatt walked back to the front room and sat in the armchair with a view of the purple door.

The purple had been more shocking when it was new. Time had made it less of an eyesore, turned it into a bearable pink coated with a soothing layer of dust. The modern hero of Mangobaag had once lived behind that door. It had been a faded brown, like all other doors in Bava House, when the hero had been a boy. He had grown up in front of Teacher Bhatt’s eyes, acquiring acne, an attitude and a shaving kit, in that order. One Sunday morning he had replaced the old brown of his door with several coats of shiny, repulsive purple. The paint took till Monday afternoon to dry out. Then, with the tip of his tongue sticking through his pink lips, Raj had taped a piece of paper just below the peephole. By the time Teacher Bhatt returned to the landing with his reading glasses, the door had been shut.

The label read: RAJ IYER, REPORTER, CITY CHRONICLE.

Raj Iyer never looked like the protagonist of a novel. If anything, he had the look of a second lead in a whodunit. He was not strikingly handsome, definitely not. The lower half of his long face was his undoing, especially the mouth, which gave his face that typical Brahmanical asymmetry, and the line of big teeth that seemed eager to fall off and be replaced with dentures. He was very tall. Hence a backbencher at St. Paul, where Teacher Bhatt had taught English and history, mostly English, till the school had told him it was time to hang up his boots, thank you. But that’s another story. Neither as sweet as the tale of Mangobaag nor as juicy as that of Raj. Nonetheless, a story worth telling. But not when a stranger was sneezing his head off in the house. Maybe later.

Teacher Bhatt had felt a pang of envy when the news of a book being written on Raj reached him a month ago. The envy, thicker than the purple paint on his neighbour’s door, took more than a week to sink in and settle down, properly arming him for unbiased reasoning. What had Raj done that a book should be written on him? The owner of one hundred and sixty-one books, Teacher Bhatt did not feel that anything he knew of Raj qualified him to be the subject of a biography, unless scratching one’s head with a burning piece of wood was reason enough to be written about.

Teacher Bhatt never considered his former student a failure. Even if he wanted to believe so, there was the purple door to remind him otherwise. Pieces of paper announcing Raj’s new designation at the City Chronicle kept appearing on the door at regular intervals, neatly taped over the previous one. How could one confront those changing labels and think of Raj as anything but a reasonable success?

Acknowledging his success was one thing, blowing it up to the size of a book was something Teacher Bhatt was not willing to accept. For him, the second worst thing in the world would be to walk down the aisle of a bookshop and find a copy of Raj Iyer: Mangobaag’s Modern Legend on the shelf, waiting to be picked up, paid for and read. Yes, that was the second worst thing in the world. The worst thing, if you are interested, was not getting The Autobiography of an English Teacher published, with his own smiling photograph above a thirty-word blurb from Nirad C. Chaudhuri on the back cover.

Why him, even Raj’s father would not have approved of a book on his son. What a waste of words, he would have said if he was around. In moments of grave desperation, Teacher Bhatt imagined the publisher irrevocably losing the manuscript in a train and the biographer dying in an accident in quick succession. He imagined the publisher deciding against assigning another biographer to do the job. If that happened, it would only be nature’s way of correcting men’s follies. As if reflecting the shift in his mood, the day brightened outside his window.

Rustling the leaves in its wake, a mango fell to the alley, missing the road roller by a few inches. Teacher Bhatt felt the urge to rush down the stairs to pick it up and sink his false teeth into it. Like the boys used to do when Bava House had been properly inhabited. The race for the mango. The prize was the bruised fruit. Raj had been the champion of his generation, in spite of the handicap of living on the third floor. Skipping steps, he would tear down the stairway, creating a little earthquake at the centre of the building. Race won, mango bitten, he would return with an arrogant, mangoflavoured smile until he outgrew the game and left the windfalls to the younger ones to compete for. All of them were gone now. There would be no race. He looked down from the window and saw the driver slide off the road roller to pick up the mango.

On the nights when mangoes swished past his bedroom window like bats, Teacher Bhatt wondered if the man working on the biography would come to Bava House in search of Raj’s childhood and, finding no one more important than him, ask him questions. He was not sure whether the race for the mangoes was worth mentioning, whether it would amount to Mangobaag’s modern hero’s first taste of success. He had been waiting for the biographer in vain. Shortly after the end of the Emergency, a few journalists had indeed stopped by, and managed to engage Raj’s father in reluctant conversation. Probably why he left Mangobaag in a hurry. Having climbed many flights of stairs and found the purple door padlocked, the journalists sometimes called on Teacher Bhatt. But that was much before the news of the biography reached him, and the dimensions of Raj’s success had still been bearable. He had sat with shades of reminiscence in his eyes and remembered Raj as a young man of exceptional courage. Had he known a book was on its way, he would have sung fewer praises of its subject. Now he regretted almost every word he had spoken of his next-door hero.

A brief letup in sneezing from the bedroom alerted him. Looking up from his memories, which had formed a square patch of sunlight on the floor, he saw the man exiting the bedroom with a red nose.

‘Judging by the number of sneezes, the whole of your family tree is remembering you,’ Teacher Bhatt joked. He remembered men cracking jokes just before they signed treaties and truces in English war movies. Yes, a timely joke could come in handy when striking a deal—that was the moral of all war movies.

The man opened his mouth to say something—something unpleasant by the curve of his lips—but an angry fit of sneezing took his retort away.

‘Let me speak to my boss about the books,’ the man said once the sneezing stopped. ‘I will come back with a quote.’

Teacher Bhatt had not known the man had a boss at the bookstore. Back in the bookstore, he had looked in command, incapable of having a superior. ‘When?’ Teacher Bhatt asked urgently. ‘I am leaving the city soon.’

‘Latest by tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Not later than that.’ Suddenly he felt the weight of one hundred and sixty-one books on his back. ‘I can’t wait longer than that.’

‘If you don’t hear from me by then, you will know that my boss is not interested in your books.’

Sneezing, the man took his leave. Teacher Bhatt returned to the bedroom and stood by the window, staring ruefully at his library confined to three boxes. Then he worked up a frown on his face, as if to tell the cartons, Why don’t you just go away and find your own means of living? I have nothing more to do with you.

The books, being books, did not respond.

PART I

1. One business card, many effigies

T

he whole of Mangobaag did not have a second tree by that name. It was a rare breed, it had a rare name, and it bore mangoes of a rare flavour as late as the end of September, when most mango trees around the city raised their empty branches in the air as in a hold-up and the Mango Market sold any fruit other than what it was named after and famed for.

The Vicks mango tree stood near the end of the alley, a good head taller than the tenement block, and beamed ornamental shadows into the tiny apartments when the sun blazed through the canopy of leaves. When the sun slipped behind the line of abandoned warehouses and darkness seeped into the alley, the tree became busy with birds that flew in to roost on its dark branches.

Unlike the tree, the alley had no name. But Teacher Bhatt, who lived the life of a semi-recluse on the third floor, secretly believed it would one day be named after him, and Bava House would be photographed from dramatic angles, like they do for murder stories, and published in newspapers, with the window he now stood at circled in white. Currently the alley was nameless, littered with yellow leaves and not as narrow as alleys usually are.

His alarm clock had conked again, but he had woken up exactly at the hour he did every day, stirred by a wind that carried the faint smell of ripe mangoes and the ragged snatches of the muezzin’s call.

It was another ordinary morning in the alley, so ordinary that he felt like breaking into a big yawn and going right back to sleep. By its looks, the day promised nothing great, not even a reply from somebody he had written to long ago, or a free booklet he had solicited by filling up coupons. It had been a full four months since his retirement and, if only he knew, it would be a full six weeks before Mrs Gandhi clamped the Emergency, and about one-and-a-half-years before she would think of lifting it.

As the day brightened, he walked to the next room and, stooping slightly, studied his face in the mirror above the washbasin. Like every morning since he had gone bald, he looked a lot like the Duke of Kent, not as ugly, but at least halfway there: lean and tall, with the same kind of whiskers and the same thin nose. His complexion was a few shades darker than the Duke’s—he had been walking around under the baking sun of Mangobaag for three decades without sunscreen or an umbrella.

Teacher Bhatt, needless to say, had been a teacher. He still was one, if someone cared to quote from his valedictory speech at St. Paul’s library hall. Once a teacher, always a teacher, he had said, and a loud round of applause had erupted in the hall, as if the entire school were eager to render him out of service. His retirement had been unpleasant. To begin with, people were hardly made to leave St. Paul; at the end of a long career, their tenure would usually be extended for one year at a time until they turned too old to teach or tame the boys. But no rules were bent to make him stay longer. On a quiet February afternoon, they congregated in the library hall to give him a bouquet of farewell flowers; the priests, who had driven up from the monastery, took turns to hug him tightly like they did not want him to leave, and just before the light receded from the premises, they all lined up for the group photograph which was later sent to him in a metal frame, showing three rows of his colleagues and four well-fed priests who, as if by some canonical decree, were the mandatory part of every photo session in the quad.

St. Paul also prepaid the taxi that dropped him at the mouth of the alley. Getting out, he had forgotten the bouquet on the backseat, but the driver had chased him down the alleyway to reunite him with the red roses. As he walked towards Bava House with three decades of service and a crimson sunset behind him, he felt bitterness towards the school management froth inside him. He swore revenge while delicately carrying the bouquet up the gloomy stairwell and stuffing the stems in a Dalda tin. Damn hybrid roses they were, taking a week to wilt and shed their petals.

He lived on the third floor, which they called the bachelors’ floor. Living alone in apartments of identical layout on either side of a narrow passage, Teacher Bhatt and his young neighbour had collectively earned the floor its nickname. Teacher Bhatt lived to the right of the landing, and Raj, probably an unintentional indication of his political leaning, to the left. No one else lived on the floor, at least not permanently, and the two tenants—one probably too young to marry and the other too old to remarry—pretended not to know the nickname they had earned the floor.

Teacher Bhatt’s apartment was the first to qualify for bachelor status when his wife died eight years ago with not much of a warning. Raj earned the tag about five years later, when his father was transferred to Calcutta and his mother managed a transfer to follow him to the city where their daughter had settled down. Raj had refused to be a part of his father’s retinue to Calcutta as he had landed a reporter’s job with the City Chronicle a month ago; he helped them board the 2.30 Bengal Mail from the Cantt Station and then rushed home to paint the front door purple from his first salary.

Flights of dark brown stairs, worn to a shiny tan in the middle, descended to the foyer in a series of twists and turns along walls of flaking paint, past doors that seemed to pull faces at each other. The only sources of light were the landing windows; the stairway remained glum during the day. At night, light spilling out of ventilators lit the stairs as feebly as candlelight.

Bava House, built half a century ago, was one of the first tenements of Mangobaag, and still the only one in the alley. The other buildings along the crazed path were warehouses long locked up due to court battles. At one end the alley ran into the back wall of Sapphire Cinema, at the other it merged into Dr Abid Ali Road. Where the crazed path met the tarred road, two banyans flanked the alley, rubbing branches, outlining an hourglass pattern against the sky.

Every morning he paused briefly under one of the banyans to watch a platoon of birds flying towards the newer part of the city; standing there, watching the birds, he pictured Fame coming up the sweep of the highway in search of his address.

In his mental picture Fame was a tall man, as prim as a salesman, dressed in freshly ironed clothes, accosting the morning walkers for directions to Bava House. Yes, his name is Mr Bhatt. I don’t know how he looks. Judging by the way he writes, he should look like a genius. Orient Longman would like to launch him as the next big thing in Anglo-Indian writing. If you could tell me where this address is . . . He envisioned someone directing Fame to the alley, and the children of Bava House guiding him to the third floor. Hello, Mr Bhatt, Fame would say when he answered the doorbell, I am here at last.

Blinking away the image of his most-awaited guest, Teacher Bhatt would head for the Municipal Park as a young priest appeared on the scene to attend to the ceramic Ganesh under the bigger of the two banyans. When Teacher Bhatt had first come to the street, there had been no statue under the banyan, just a few hanks of roots that hung like plaits of matted hair, sweeping the layers of leaves when a wind stirred them. On the day the statue made its appearance, just after the curfew had ended after a long riot, it looked fresh from the mould, its off-white coat of paint streaked with stray bristles from a paintbrush. This was about a decade before the statue was blessed with a tin roof; the priest was a recent addition, who turned up at the crack of dawn to mumble prayers, line flowers around the statue and tinkle a brass bell in a small way. The priest was so young he looked like a schoolboy returning from a religious tableau, hurrying home so that he could finish his homework before school.

At the intersection, Teacher Bhatt bumped into Narain. Miserable Twins—that was what they had jointly been called at St. Paul, for reasons that were almost obvious. Men who had briefly flirted with fashion in the early 1950s and got eternally stuck with the same cut of shirts and the same style of trousers, they could not help looking a bit like each other. Unwittingly, their choice of colours had always been similar. So were their activities: being English teachers, they shared the sunless room behind the library during recess, and hailing from the same part of Mangobaag, they took the same bus to work and back.

But much as he liked Narain’s company, Teacher Bhatt hated nothing more than being compared to him. He argued—sometimes with his colleagues but mostly with himself—that the resemblances were laughably remote, and fading quickly as they aged. When they had been young, their looks had been identical, a constant cause of embarrassment for Teacher Bhatt when they had to sit next to each other for the yearly photo-sessions. But then, as they never say, familiarity killed contempt.

Inside the park, at a stone bench under a lime tree, Narain ended his morning walk, and Teacher Bhatt began his. Narain read his newspaper in detail while Teacher Bhatt did a dozen brisk laps along the cement path that skirted the oval grassy heart of the park. Along his route, old men sat in the morning sun, smirking faintly at his unintentionally comic exercise regimen.

Twelve laps around the park equalled walking up to MC and halfway back, a bit unpleasant with the cold morning breeze blowing in from the sea, but worth it for the views it offered. No place in the city was more photographed than the boulevard the British had built and christened Malgova Central, later abbreviated to MC. Most serious walkers of the city went to MC at daybreak and bounced around till the traffic thickened, though there was no telling what made them go there: the serenity of the boulevard or the herd mentality of the ancient city.

If Mangobaag were a face, MC would have been its most prominent feature. If the city were a movie, MC would have been its most breathtaking frame. If it were a museum (Teacher Bhatt sometimes felt it was as he walked past ruins of forts and remains of canons), MC would have been its finest exhibit. Ramrod straight, the boulevard stretched for about a kilometre, a neat row of mango trees dividing it in the middle.

In early spring, MC was carpeted with mango blossoms the winds brought down like a drizzle. What the winds could not pluck ripened into canary-coloured mangoes, and those that survived the fury of slingshots dropped on their own accord at the end of the season, sometimes smearing the windshields of passing vehicles with a yellow starburst, at other times smashing on the tarmac and turning instantly into pulp under car tyres: a sweet revenge for messing up windshields and roofs. Where the median of trees ended, so did the unusual luxury of the broad motorway. The road narrowed abruptly after that and funnelled into a street lined with government bungalows and the clubhouse. Over this staccato clump of buildings loomed the derrick cranes of the wharf, which stood another mile away, by the sea.

Shortly after his retirement, Teacher Bhatt stopped taking the MC route for his morning walk; Mangobaag’s beauty spot was getting unbearably crowded with joggers and athletes; sometimes he even saw dogs being walked down the boulevard, one of them a black Labrador led by Father Ben, the patron of St. Paul. He switched to the Municipal Park, which also facilitated meeting Narain every day and eavesdropping on what happened at St. Paul in his absence.

‘Bhatt, your Mrs Gandhi is in trouble.’ Narain looked up from the paper as he trotted past the lime tree. He was halfway through his third lap, his T-shirt already drenched in sweat.

‘My Mrs Gandhi?’ He frowned, but didn’t bother to stop, reserving the rest of the conversation for the next lap. He liked to finish his laps at one go; he liked the way his heart throbbed at the end of the session. It reminded him of the way the windowpanes in his living room rattled when his young neighbour developed a thirst for loud music late at night. As he jogged, he tried to imagine Mrs Gandhi in many possible predicaments: war, rebellion, daughters-in-law, chickenpox. Nothing seemed improbable; he always had a feeling that she existed uncomfortably close to misfortune.

‘What’s wrong with your Mrs Gandhi?’ he asked when he was near Narain again.

‘She is as much mine as yours,’ Narain said without taking his eyes off the newspaper. ‘She has been found guilty of manipulating elections. And not fit to rule this country—as if you need a court of law to say that.’

Untouched by what he had heard, Teacher Bhatt rolled stiffly away. Trumpet flowers and morning glories were in bloom along the path. ‘Is your Mrs Gandhi resigning?’ he enquired on the penultimate lap. Narain had finished reading the newspaper and was sitting with it tucked under one thigh.

‘She is as much mine as yours,’ Narain said. ‘I don’t think she will resign.’

On his final lap, trudging towards the invisible finishing line, Teacher Bhatt spotted Raj under the lime tree, seated next to Narain. About twenty months from his eventual place in the annals of Mangobaag, Raj looked seriously worn-out and completely unaware of his future bearings. ‘What’s news, Raj?’ Teacher Bhatt asked as he sat down between his former student and ex-colleague.

What’s news? You can put a journalist in a silly crisis with a simple question like that. Raj hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he had been asked about news headlines for the day or if it was just a pleasantry. Confused, he managed a smile and locked his fingers. ‘News is that Indira Gandhi is stepping down.’

‘Really?’ Narain knitted his eyebrows. ‘The Indian Express doesn’t say that.’

‘Neither does the City Chronicle. But that is the only option she is left with.’

Teacher Bhatt was sceptical about predictions unless they came from soothsayers of some repute, or from his long departed maternal uncle who had taken a close look at the heel of a ten-year-old Teacher Bhatt and deciphered the signs of fame and fortune recorded on the Size 4 foot. Raj’s legs were under the bench, heels hidden in grey running shoes.

‘I doubt that,’ Narain said. ‘The father of modern India has a very cunning daughter. I can’t imagine her saying, Look, I am stepping down because the court wants me to. Someone please take my seat. She is something when it comes to power equations.’

‘But not this time,’ Raj said with the certainty of having listened to many political analysts and several newsroom discussions neither Teacher Bhatt nor Narain had access to.

‘See, Narain,’ Teacher Bhatt said, as if to ridicule Raj for his predictions, ‘your Mrs Gandhi will be powerless this time.’

‘She is as much mine as yours,’ Narain said curtly and looked away.

‘For your information, she is not mine at all.’ They kept disowning her as if she were a pack of contraband they had been caught with.

The sun had climbed above the trees, and the only statue in the park—of an eighteenth-century royal—stood with the sun on its bird-shit-splattered back. Once the Emergency had been declared, lived through and then lifted, they would erect another statue on the far side of the park, in the size and shape of the man whose knees clicked as he stood up now and declared, ‘The end is near for her.’ Which ironically meant the end was nearer for him.

Their shoulders occasionally knocking against each other, Teacher Bhatt and Raj walked back to the alley, leaving Narain to pick his arthritic way home. Teacher Bhatt stopped by the banyan to offer quick prayers to Ganesh. Raj stood away and watched like a Muslim.

Behind the sprawling boughs of the Vicks mango tree, Bava House wore the appearance of a church from which the service had been moved to a newer place. They went up the stairwell in silence, past grainy brown doors set on either side of the dusky landings. Before he could remember to ask Raj what he had long been meaning to, about the spare key, they had reached the bachelors’ floor, and Raj was already closing the purple door on him, like the cover of a hardbound book he had considered reading the opening line of.

A lost key meant the same thing anywhere in the world: endless worries. Though he had not exactly lost a key, he considered