Many years ago, as one of fiction's finest citizens, Colonel Aureliano Buendia of One Hundred Years of Solitude, faced the firing squad, he "was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear waters that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs". Many years later, in one of fiction's fabulous geographical journeys, remembrance has reached another riverbank, another village. Standing by the river in the remotest south, gazing at the ancient waters that define his own private Macondo, is novel's newest redeemer, struggling to paraphrase the story of ancestral voyage, as though he is the chosen stylus of memory, and all the while caressing a blue mango, a rare variety "so sweet that after you have eaten one you cannot taste sugar for at least three days". Only destiny can snatch it from him, and bring him back to this moment in the present, whose colour is not blue but the diluted gray of a wintry January morning, as the author of a sprawling, genre-enhancing first novel that has already been sold to 11 countries and is scheduled to become the publishing sensation of 2002.

NOVEL'S NEWEST REDEEMER: Davidar

Such hyperbole cannot sway David Davidar, the novelist who also happens to be the publisher of Penguin Books India. Then, novels like his The House of Blue Mangoes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Viking; Rs 395; 432 pp) are not published every other day. They happen, as if the much-toasted Indian Novel in English needs an event like this to elevate its art from the feeble to the fabulous. The House of Blue Mangoes is a big novel, not only in size but in the history of life it carries in words that defy the received aesthetics of first novels-small intimacies drawn from an insignificant "I". In The House of Blue Mangoes, the passage of life is a progression of epic dimension, through the sighs and sorrows of generations, the passions and pathology of identity, semaphored by a violent history. And on the march are patriarchs with fire in the soul and iron in the fist, exiles animated by the idea of homecoming, outcasts wasted by the paradox of freedom, and many bit players and extras, all of them playing out their raw romance on a stage constructed by the art and architecture rarely seen in Indian fiction in English, with raw material mined from the deep recesses of history and memory. Davidar has taken 10 years to finish it. Worth the effort, this structure will remain an enduring landmark in fiction.

"It was a story that was waiting within me to happen. After all, our stories are discovered by ourselves, and nobody is going to write them for us," says Davidar, trying to reduce the genealogy of 400 pages to four sentences. The images were there: the seaside village, the founding of a settlement (which his grandfather did), and the idea of passage, from village to small town to big city.

Spanning three generations and a sizable swathe of Indian history, from the fag end of the 19th century to Independence, this tremorous family saga, populated by almost every variation of the traveller, has its epicentre on the bank of the Chevathar, which has also given the village its name. In the village stands the Big House, where presides the thalaivar, the headman, Solomon Dorai, and on his land grows the groves of Chevathar Neelam, the blue mango, which has made the Dorai name famous throughout the south. The first part of the novel chronicles the rise and the fatal fall of Solomon, the cracks in his private imperium, inflicted by caste, hate and fate. The sexual assault on a young girl in the acacia forest violates the tranquillity of Chevathar, and tension builds up between the two major castes of the village-Andavars, to which the Dorais belong, and the Vedhars, led by his opponent Muthu. Solomon, dictator and family man, is larger than the lives he is presiding over. He plays fair to keep his domain out of caste violence. He can't. Chevathar erupts, the river prepares to turn red, the Big House becomes the centre of a universe that is falling apart. The movement of violence-physical and emotional-is a tribute to the choreography of Davidar.

EXTRACT The House Of Blue Mangoes Spring 1899. As the ordinary violence of dawn sweeps across the lower Coromandel coast, a sprawling village comes into view. The lurid sky excepted, everything about it is tranquil. Away to the west, a great headland, thickly maned with coconut palms, juts into the sea, partially enclosing a deserted beach on which long slow swells, clear and smooth as glass, break with scarcely a sound. Beyond the beach, the waters of an estuary reflect the rage of colour overhead. This is where the Chevathar, the country's southernmost river and the source of the village's name, prepares for its final run to the sea. On a bluff overlooking the estuary, almost hidden by coconut palms, is a small church. From there, the village straggles upriver for about a mile and a half, ending at the bridge that connects it to the town of Meenakshikoil on the opposite bank. Through the village runs a narrow tarred road that stands out like a fresh scar on the red soil. The road connects all Chevathar's major landmarks: the Vedhar quarter to the north, the ruins of an eighteenth-century mud fort, Vakeel Perumal's two-storey house with its bone-white walls, the Amman and the Murugan temples, and on a slight elevation, the house of the thalaivar, Solomon Dorai, barely visible behind a fringe of casuarina trees and coconut palms. Surrounding the walls of the Big House, as it is known, are several trees that aren't usually seen in the area-a tall umbrella-shaped rain tree, a breadfruit tree with leaves that explode in green star-shaped clusters and many jackfruit trees laden with heavy, spiky fruit that spring directly from the trunk. These are the result of the labours of Charity Dorai, who does not come from these parts. In an effort to allay her homesickness she began planting trees from her homeland. Twenty years later they have altered the treescape of Chevathar. Down to the river from the Big House tumble groves of Chevathar Neelam, a rare hybrid of a mango native to the south. The trees are astonishingly beautiful, the fruit glinting blue against the dark green leaves. The locals will tell you that the Chevathar Neelam, which has made the Dorai name famous throughout the district, is so sweet that after you've eaten one you cannot taste sugar for at least three days. So the locals say. The rest of the village is quickly described. More coconut palms, the paracheri to the southwest, the barbers' village further south, the huts of the Andavar tenant farmers close to the road, and a dozen or so wells and tanks that raise blind glittering eyes to the morning light. The villagers rise early, but as it's some way yet before the fields are to be prepared for the transplanting of rice, the men are not up and about. Most of the women have risen before dawn and are racing to finish their household chores. Today the village celebrates the Pangunni Uthiram festival...

The world that comes to an end on the riverbank is one of fiction's most cultivated provinces, whose inhabitants are lives sculpted to enduring imperfections. The perfect Solomon, of course, whose indomitable spirit and overwhelming presence, his faith in himself and his unassailable fury, make him a man destined to control-including his own death. His wife Charity, the representative Dorai woman, the creator of the finest fish biryani in the world, a silent witness to the follies and fantasies of Dorai men. Muthu Vedhar, the other big landlord of Chevathar, and Solomon's caste enemy. Father Paul Ashworth, always appalled by the institution of caste. His salvation formula: refashion the scriptures. "The Manusmriti, the Old Testament, and scores of other holy texts could do with judicious editing and interpretation." Solomon's sons, Daniel and Aaron. The first an introvert who likes to watch sand crabs at play, and who will never live up to the fighting spirit of his father; the second a quintessential Dorai male, fiery and overreaching, who proves his masculine adolescence by jumping wells, a fear-crossing daredevilry to establish manhood in Chevathar. Vakeel Perumal, whose conversion to Christianity is steeped more in communal mischief than in religious faith. They are in a village at the end of the world, the river being the last line of destiny, beyond which is the sea. In the last battle on the Chevathar, between Andavars and Vedhars, a passion play of caste, Ashworth will court his private cross in the sand, Solomon will finish in his own blood an eventful chapter in the Dorai legacy, and Davidar will take The House of Blue Mangoes to newer places of action.

New journeys for the orphaned legatees of the Dorai name, especially that of Daniel and Aaron, whose paths will meet one day at a junction in history-and the poignancy of that reunion a rare moment of frisson. Daniel, the misfit, uprooted by his father's fury, begins another life in the town. Patronised by a master practitioner of Siddha medicine, the exclusive medicine of the Tamils, he will become a man of name and fortune, and the inventor of a fairness cream, Dr Dorai's Moonwhite Thylam, which will become the rage of the colour-conscious south. But, elsewhere in India, rage is rising against the colour of the coloniser. Daniel doesn't want the rage intruding into the comfortable world of medicine and family. Rather, he appreciates the comfort and order provided by the Raj. It is Aaron's destiny to give himself to the romance of the revolution. He is the outcast, the rebel who has long ago established his heroism by jumping the biggest well in Chevathar. Today, the diameter of the danger he has to cross is determined by anger, the sense of rejection, of betrayal. His underground rebellion against the Raj is the political expression of a personal grief, his romance with the assassin's gun is a compensation for the lost romance of the blue mangoes,

He is one of those small men swayed by the Big Idea, the name of which is freedom. "What was our big idea?" asks Davidar, trying to explain the political grammar of his imagination. "Freedom," he answers. "Today we have no big idea." Well, you have a big novel on it, in which the idea translates itself into personal essays of redemption, as in the lives of Solomon's sons. Aaron, the son who was denied the truth, the brother who was betrayed by a brother, will kill a white official for the cause and die a wretched death. Aaron is Solomon unrealised, his battle another variation of Solomon's, a bigger battle but a less honourable death, and his enemy larger than father's, as colonialism is to caste. The son who reclaims father is Daniel, who returns to Chevathar to build a new settlement, to reestablish the glory of Dorais-of the blue mangoes. He will play out Solomon Part II, scripted by new situations, and his utopia will be let down by the brand new Dorai man, Kannan, Dr Daniel's monster, sort of. Everyone is the other's unrealised possibility, everyone is an exile who travels only to come back to the Dorais' house of spirit, and Kannan is the last traveller who exorcises himself to write the last passage in the story of the eternity of return.

The House of Blue Mangoes is a majestic memorial service, written in the classical tradition of the grand narrative that faithfully follows the calendar of life to capture the enormity of the story. A story where history, ranging from the casteism of the breast wars of the south to the little-known southern turns in the national movement, is a defining adjective to being. After all, Davidar's role models in writing a novel where the realms of the public and the private are in constant combat are two great structures in fiction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. So in this novel set against the unchronicled backdrop of the south-after Salman Rushdie's west and Vikram Seth's north, here comes another enlarged destination-a few set pieces, almost Russian in its elaborate choreography, alone personalise history, of the land as well as the mind. An English dinner in the plantation bungalow, a tiger hunting in the forest, a mango festival in the village ... they are palimpsestic celebration of realising the hidden.

Looking back, Davidar realises, it was a process as big as the house by the river-and his finest editors in those days were his wife and Seth. " When you are in publishing, your sense of judgment gets fussy." And when he submitted the manuscript, it was under a pseudonym. He didn't want the advantage of being a publisher himself. Unlike The Blue Mangoes, there are no maggots within the book that is born out of those fruits. In Davidar's pages, the boldest and the biggest after Midnight's Children, lives perfected by fiction's newest master craftsman allow no such corruption.

And Davidar is already thinking of a big novel on religion. He is very definitive: "If I write another book it will be about religion, and it will be set in Bombay.""Caste to religion, a natural progression?""The dynamics of family and the sociology of south were a fascination." The Blue Mangoes has given a shape and life to it. The next is religion because: "Keep it where it belongs. Don't pervert it."

Still, it cannot be didacticism for Davidar, whose visit to the library is not a note of dissonance in the narrative. Information, as it is in The Blue Mangoes, is subordinated to imagination, which at the moment has developed a rare real estate in fiction, on the riverbank of memory. Take a trip.