House of Blue Mangoes, The

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It is the end of the 19th century and headman Solomon Dorai of the village of Chevathar in Southern India is desperately fighting against a world that is changing and to hold the remaining members of his family together and for them to uphold the traditional ways of their lifestyle but against the political and social unrest at this period this is nigh on impossible. It portrays village life in South India at the turn of the nineteenth century brilliantly, covering the rituals, festivals, large family celebrations and also the caste conflicts and ugly war mongerers who stir up trouble for their own advantage. Daniel was interested in education and was despised by his father and brother for not being a warmonger. He and his mother lived with his maternal grandfather after Solomon's death and Daniel came into his own there. He studies medicine and his fame soon spreads far and wide. Then suddenly he decides to return to Chevathar because male name lineage blah blah. The story drifts away at this point as Daniel sets out to bring his entire extended family together. I really failed to see the motivation behind all this effort. Doraipuram. The only character I really liked was Aaron. The accidental Freedom Fighter. Daniel wasn’t a well chalked out character. I couldn’t place what exactly he was or what he wanted to be. Did he want to be the thalaivar or not? Was Doraipuram his dream or his ego trip? It seemed very contrived, the way the settlement was built and populated. Characters just popped in and out without giving you the opportunity to actually know them. That gossiping woman who had an entire chapter dedicated to her, I read the book two days ago but seem to have forgotten her name already. Such forgettable pieces of characters.

Thematically, the story is more about events than ideas, and more about a specific set of characters than about the meaning of these events and characters. Ultimately there is no resolution. We know the outcome of the history in which the story is set – a true history, but what is right and what is wrong, or whether Aaron’s engagement or Daniel’s sense of family and the personal is right or not is left open. Kannan finds a kind of sense of purpose in home – almost a Panglossian tilling of his garden: “I’m here, it is the place of my heart”, and perhaps that is the ultimate theme of the book – to stay home, and become yourself, and till your own garden/grow your mangoes. In any case, Kannan’ return home is reasonably satisfying as an ending, even if the ultimate struggles of his country are to continue beyond the setting of this story. 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?" I suspect I might have felt as if I were skimming this book, even if I hadn't been skimming it in fact. The pace seemed rushed at times, and overall the story felt superficial. Maybe because it was. I'm not sure this was actually a story, to tell the truth. Certainly the characters were not characters. I think this was simply an excuse to depict colonial India from the late nineteenth century leading up to independence, and to have the characters serve as mouthpieces for various Indian and British viewpoints on the colonial experience.

Blue Mango

Feud Episode: At one point, Alice refers to Truman as Helen and T.D.'s friend, but not her own, implying she doesn't see him as a friend anymore. The Mangifera casturi, among others, are grown at the Fairchild Farm in Homestead, Florida as part of our living collection. The genes of this valuable tree have been used to create new hybrids. Dr. Ledesma is working on a breeding program and hundreds of new trees are the progeny now under evaluation. She is looking for the perfect mango for a new generation — mangoes resistant to diseases than can be grown free of heavy chemical products, but are also delicious and nutritious. Blue Mangoes is a story featured in Ice Scream and Milo's Reading Buddy. It focuses on a birdlike creature called Gangoose McGee trying to get another birdlike character called Nicholas Mellow to eat blue mangoes. At the moment of his triumph, he had escaped the world, the hundreds of little things we say and do to ourselves to bind us down, make us helpless little worms, who on their deathbeds only remember and lament what they always wanted to do, but never had the courage for." Blue mangoes, blue mangoes!", urged Gangoose McGee. "Won't you please try one? They're fresh and they're free!".

The planter isn't expected to be a man of culture shall we say?; 'Yes, I know, Major Stevenson asked me whether I read a lot, when he interviewed me. I said no, and he said, good, very good, planters are expected to get their boots dirty, not lounge around reading books." Perhaps what made the book all the more endearing was that Davidar showed how many individuals are often out of place in both polarities but fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. As the offspring of immigrant parents who left India several decades ago and having been born and brought up outside the Indian sub-continent, I could relate to all the issues in the book and that feeling of being trapped inbetween two very different worlds, both mutually opposed to each other and feeling ne'er at home anywhere, East or West. Many nouns that end with a consonant + “o” will form the plural with a simple “s”: pianos, memos, concertos. At the same time, as it can tend to, English spelling creates its own exceptions by adding an “e” to the plural of some words ending in “o”: heroes, vetoes, tomatoes. This thwarts a go-to guideline.What I really liked about the writing was that there was little exposition and explanation. For example, Davidar does not explicitly the reader things like the fact that a wedding thaali comes from Hindu practices but is used by Tamil Christians as well. He also does not point out to the way people are named from both the Bible and Hindu scripture: Apart from Solomon, Daniel and Aaron, there is Ramadoss (meaning one who serves Ram) or Kannan (the diminutive associated with Krishna). Davidar doesn't try to explain how India functions and that is the best thing about the book. If the reader is as clueless as the beleaguered British - portrayed with both sympathy and simmering anger in the book - the author doesn't seem to mind. Serious Business: Alice makes a huge deal over the fact that Truman refuses to eat ice cream, even referring to his preconceived notion as "prejudice". I could have forgiven some of the clunky writing and wild leaps of plot if I had cared at all about any of the characters. None of the three main characters is remotely likeable or interesting. "Unlikeable" I could forgive, but I never had the sense that the author really understood his characters' motivations, either. Stuff happens to them, and they have big revelations, but none of it is tied into anything we've been shown or understood about these characters. The bad guys are bad, bad, bad (particularly the Anglo-Indian hussy in the final section of the novel), the good guys are pretty bad too although the author seems to think they are just well-rounded, and overall, by the end I was just rooting for the tiger. The blue mango can be your ideal fruit tree: an ornamental tree that produces delicious, and attractive, mangoes. And growing one (or more) makes you part of its ex-situ conservation! As the struggle for Indian independence intensifies, the third generation of the Dorai family begin their life journey. Daniel's son, Kannan, moves away from the family home to marry the woman he loves and make a life for himself. And this is where the story rambles a lot as it tries to incorporate too many things that do not seem relevant to what came before.

On the beach, Alice plays fetch with Helen's dogs, while Helen and T.D. play cards. Alice wonders if Truman thinks he won't like ice cream because something "weird" happened to him, like a bug coming out of his ice cream when he was a baby. Then, at school, Alice gives her report on Italy, but adds in a jab at Truman by saying that you wouldn't know how great gelato tastes if you're "prejudiced" against ice cream. In a world irrevocably shaken by historical events, most of his characters remain curiously unscathed. Too entangled in their own familial disputes to notice the world around them changing, the characters come across as superfluous, ignorant and entirely self-centered. For example, while Gandhi is busy becoming a household name, Daniel embarks on a ridiculous expedition to taste every mango in India for the sole purpose of confirming his opinion that Chevathar's fabled blue variety are indeed, as he suspects, the best in the land. Only Aaron, Daniel's brother, is swept up in the tide of history. He joins the struggle for freedom with catastrophic results. Set in a village in the erstwhile Madras Presidency, this is a story of three generations of a family. Prefer? What is that? The name of your brother?" "No, "prefer" means you like one thing more than another.

He had never thought that his brother's rejection of him would grieve him so much or linger so long, but it did, deep within him, rising up from time to time. At such times, he would stop whatever he was doing and immerse himself completely in his sense of loss. Long experience had taught him that this was the best way to treat wounds of the past. Experience them fully, and then set them aside to resume the daily business of living."

Aerith and Bob: A strange example in Blue Mangoes. Each bird has one normal name and one weird name: Nicholas Mellow (normal first name, weird last name) and Gangoose McGee (weird first name, normal last name). Blue mango’s new foliage is bright red, like that of so many tropical plants (an interesting story in its own right), always eye-catching against the deep green, strappy, classically tropical foliage of the mango. It’s known to be resistant to anthracnose, and loves our wet sub-tropical climate. The fruit may be small compared to other mangoes, but hey, it’s blue!

More from The Author

The Good Book was right: a man must leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife . . . for she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life."