The Toss of a Lemon (10 page)

The siddhas have come.

The eldest nods as she catches his eye. She is, as always, unhappy to see them. She crosses to her husband, who is muttering softly, intense emotion working his brow, his breath fighting in his nostrils. She takes his shoulder and he startles, panting, sweating, looking around wildly.

“What, dear, what is it?” Sivakami asks. She feels she knows; she feels she is about to cry; she feels a little feverish herself, hot and cold at once.

“I dreamt...” Hanumarathnam is calming. “I dreamt... that you and the children will lead long, healthy lives.” He backs away from her to lean against the wall. “And that I will not recover from this fever.”

Sivakami stares at him. “You are not even afflicted with the fever.”

“I will not recover from it.”

“You are not stricken.” She is aware of her damp palms, twisting the folds of her sari at her waist. “It doesn’t affect adults.” In fact, two adults have contracted the pox and have suffered even more than the children did.

Hanumarathnam rises and joins the shadows blocking the light from the door. Sivakami sinks to the floor, still protesting. “You are hale and strong. You never dream. Why should I wake you just because you talk in your sleep?”

He has gone.

In the evening, Muchami comes in through the back. Seeing the main hall empty, he retreats through the rooms to the courtyard. He addresses Sivakami from outside the kitchen door.

“Where is he?”

“Out,” she says without looking up, slicing vegetables with alarming speed. The children are asleep in the pantry, where she can watch them.

“Out?” Muchami asks.

“He’s out.” She sounds as angry as she feels and feels no need to hide this from Muchami. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Oh...” Muchami nods. “Oh. The siddhas?”

“What else?” She leans out the door to toss some peels into the courtyard. Her face is puffy.

Muchami’s eyes narrow. “You aren’t crying over this?”

In some other servant, some other household, Muchami’s manner might be considered audacious, even insolent, but his are the liberties of those lifelong servants who become closer than family, and more trusted.

“Stupid.” Sivakami sniffs wetly, wipes her face on the end of her cotton sari and starts to sob. “I just can’t stop. I’m making onion sambar, that’s why. When we stop eating onions, I’ll stop crying.”

“Onions never make you cry,” Muchami reminds her gently.

“So I’m crying because it’s about time he gave them up!” She rises, slams the blade down into the block and dumps the vegetables into the blackened iron pot on the fire. “After all, he says he’s going to die anytime, he should start getting ready for it...”

“You angry?”

“Of course not, don’t be ridiculous.” She pokes another dung chip into the fire and fans it. “Can’t he do as he likes?”

“Sure, he’s the husband.” Muchami wags his head. “But he shouldn’t be taking off and leaving us alone like this.”

Sivakami cries harder.

When Hanumarathnam returns, two mornings later, he faces identical resentful glares from both of these souls who adore him.

That night, Hanumarathnam drops a pinch of veeboothi on the small gold tongue of his daughter and the small pale tongue of his son. He places his hand on the head of each. His touch on Thangam is lingering. His touch on Vairum is brief, but the little boy glows rapturous under his hand, and Hanumarathnam’s eyes become tender for a second. Then that is over.

Before going to bed, Hanumarathnam gives Sivakami a large packet of veeboothi and instructs her to distribute it among the parents of the village, for all of their children, sick and healthy.

“That should do it,” he says. She accepts the packet silently and he lies down to sleep.
Siddha medicine
, she thinks, and shudders, but still, she hopes it works.

That night, when he begins mumbling, she puts her hand on his arm to wake him. The arm is very warm, and she feels his forehead and stomach. A fever has taken hold of him, and there are pustules forming on his neck and arms.

A WEEK PASSES, during which Hanumarathnam never once completely awakens. Word spreads. People drop in constantly, whispering words of pity that wear on Sivakami. Each of the visitors brings some remedy, Ayurvedic compounds from famous practitioners or family recipes, steeped green leaves or pounded buds, bitter barks or shaven twigs, the resulting broths sweetened with sugar or softened with butter. Sivakami dutifully pours them all down Hanumarathnam’s throat. The guests quarrel over their remedies, disagreeing on which is best. Each argues that the other remedies are interfering with the effectiveness of her own. They make a lot of noise and bustle in the house, whose occupants are unaccustomed to such cacophony. Sivakami summons silent endurance. Muchami enjoys the spectacle, until he recalls its cause.

Murthy is particularly aggressive with some veeboothi from the Palani temple; Sivakami lets him administer it to Hanumarathnam himself, in light of their relationship. Hanumarathnam’s sisters arrive with accusing eyes and suggestions that Sivakami try all the remedies she has already tried. She does her best not to disagree and to avoid them. She has to believe she has tried everything. She had retained a small amount of the veeboothi Hanumarathnam brought back with him from the forest and administers that too.

It certainly has been effective on the children. Thangam and Vairum are no longer ill. They have returned to their old activities: Thangam sitting out front and being fawned over, Vairum giving orders to Muchami, but they are unsettled by the crowds.

Vairum has a set of rocks he has named for their family: Appa, father, a long thin grey rock; Amma, mother, a slim oval of smooth black rock; Akka, big sister, soft, golden sandstone; Vairum, a small slab of unpolished quartz (it glints in places); Muchami, a great chunk of unfired brick. The rock family spends all its time exploring, usually places a little boy is too small to be permitted or too big to fit. They crouch in the fire under the bathwater. They take daily flights through the air to roll off the roof. Vairum, the smallest family member, once navigated a cow’s entire digestive tract. Today, they will explore a small soft spot in the foundation of the house, on the side of the garden.

“Dig,” he says to Muchami, handing him a stick. The overworked servant looks at him blankly, pretending, this time, not to understand. Comprehension is a subjective and fleeting art.

Vairum points and stamps his foot, repeating, “Dig! Dig.”

Muchami examines the stick and starts using it to pick his toenail. Vairum cuffs Muchami’s shin and grabs the stick. Muchami wrests it back. Vairum whines a little, then settles down to watching his good pal Muchami create a little tunnel home, a homey little cave, under the house.

Inside the house, Vairum’s aunts are alternately relaxing and rearranging everything. They are fifteen and thirteen years older than Hanumarathnam, and lived with him only a few years before going to their husbands’ houses, which perhaps is why they didn’t fight harder to take their little brother in when their parents died. Later, they were able to justify it, saying that he received an excellent education and upbringing with their aunt and uncle, who genuinely wanted him, as they would say to one another, and to Hanumarathnam, and to others who hadn’t even asked. And of course we soon had small children of our own to care for, the eldest would assert, with the younger parroting her, and
How would we have asked our in-laws for such a favour, and Murthy got to keep his brother!
It had worked out so well for all concerned. Annam and Vicchu, his aunt and uncle, had sent him to spend holidays with them from time to time. Since Hanumarathnam’s marriage, his sisters had come to visit several times, a thing they had rarely done before. It was as though they needed to assert their presence in his life a little more, now that they were in danger of displacement.

Visitors continue to arrive, even from neighbouring villages and towns, people whom Hanumarathnam has healed. Not one child in his village is now sick with the fever. Each family will carry out its pledge, to carry fire or milk to Mariamman’s temple during her annual festival, yet each grieves the imminent passing of the man who came as close to science as any they have known. Sivakami hears their remarks, floating in from the main hall to the kitchen with the tch-tch of clucking tongues.

“Such a shame ...”

“Such a young man ...”

“Oh, what will we do!”

“You know, his first concern was always for us...”

She stays in the kitchen, churning out delicacies to keep their mouths busy so they’ll talk less, to keep her hands busy so her heart will forget to break.

Vairum charges in from the garden, looking for his mother, wanting her to come and see how cozy the stone family is, stowed in their cave against the elements. He gallops through the main hall toward the kitchen, but his father’s eldest sister grabs his arm. It’s nearly yanked out of its socket, so intent is he on the kitchen and so abrupt is the detention.

The aunt pulls Vairum toward her large face and booms, “Hallo, my boy, taking care of your father?” and then speaks to the others over Vairum’s head. “This is the ugly one. His sister’s out on the veranda.”

Vairum wrenches away from her and barrels once more for the kitchen. Now he is intercepted by a neighbour, who wants him to eat a snack from a large tray she carries. He doesn’t want any, but her grip on his arm is tight. When he tugs the captive limb free, it flings upward, slamming into the tray and sending its contents airward. Consistent with his generous nature, Vairum has distributed the snacks equally among all persons in the room.

Silence falls with a thud and awakens Hanumarathnam, who sits bolt upright from a mumbling sleep. With calm resolve, he seeks out Sivakami’s eyes where she stands in the kitchen doorway. Across the multitude that separates them, he summons her with a slight movement of his head.

Now: no middle-class Brahmin wife with any kind of breeding walks through the main hall and talks to her husband in front of guests, and today these guests include her sisters-in-law, who would subject her to no end of criticism, both to her face and behind her back, alone and in mixed company. Though Sivakami is spirited, brave and has had reason to feel encouraged in her life, she cannot obey her husband this time.

Instead, she silently iterates the names of the gods, her children’s need for a father, Hanumarathnam’s relative youth. She cannot completely banish, though, the feeling that if his time has come, she is powerless. How can she stop the progress of Yama’s water buffalo?

Hanumarathnam looks at her a long moment, and her eyes are held in his. His sisters will later liken her to a frightened young goat, unable to move though a tiger walks toward it. A little part of them wants to hear her bawl like a captured kid, but this doesn’t happen. They never see Sivakami cry. She doesn’t permit it.

When Vairum ran into the house, Muchami had left on rounds of some landholdings. He has tried not to let the worries at the house keep him from his tasks. He goes along the canal that runs behind the houses, since he will not walk on the Brahmin street except in the company of a Brahmin, and at the end pauses a moment to spit a red stream of betel juice into the long, green grasses. As he straightens, his eyes grow wide. The largest water buffalo he has ever seen, its coat a lustrous pewter, its massive horns curving out at their tips, is strolling along the Brahmin quarter, unaccompanied by cart or driver. Muchami moves to behind the temple and, mesmerized by the water buffalo’s swaying hump, watches it until it is in front of Hanumarathnam’s house. Then the servant pivots and darts back along the narrow path behind the Brahmin-quarter houses.

Inside the house, Hanumarathnam’s head falls back, exhaling a word that sounds, to at least half the people in the room, like “podhail.”

His sisters, standing closest to him, hear the word and their eyes meet. Podhail: buried treasure. The possibilities of that word occupy the sisters’ thoughts as their younger, only, brother dies.

In that moment, Vairum, having run out to the garden in a tantrum, has kicked all the carefully cleared earth back into the hole under their house. He wets the earth with tears and stamps it and pounds it, his mouth pulled down in an ugly shape, until the place is packed flat. The child of the black-diamond eyes, his golden, oblivious sister, his tiny mother, his slim, dead father, their Muchami—buried forever. Podhail.

They will find Vairum here later, asleep with his head on the ground. They will awaken him, wipe his earth-streaked face and explain that now he is the man of the house. He will learn he has work to do.

IT IS INCREDIBLE TO SIVAKAMI that Hanumarathnam spent years preparing her for his passing. She is shocked by the heat of bereavement: a pyretic pain behind her eyelids and in the unseen caverns of her body. She doesn’t cry and is aware that observers, such as her husband’s sisters, remark this. She feels she contains floods of tears, but they are boiled dry before they can spill.

And the house, too, is alight with funereal activity, the throngs of well-wishers turned chorus, ushering Hanumarathnam’s spirit forward. Sivakami is bidden to wear her best clothes, her finest jewels, during the ten days it will take for that to happen.

His body is dressed in new, unsoiled clothes such as are worn only by the dead and taken to the cremation ground. Little Vairum will light his father’s pyre. This is one reason everyone needs a son.

At the cremation ground, Sivakami does not tell her children that their father is within the blaze. This seems unnecessary. When Vairum runs ahead and picks something off the ground, Muchami slaps it from his hand. It is a bone, but no one explains this. As he throws a burning faggot on his father’s pyre, Vairum is crying because Muchami wouldn’t let him have that white stone.