The Toss of a Lemon (20 page)

Sivakami finishes the letter with chat, verbose as she’s never been with those two.

The scribe is suitably impressed with the information he has just learned, and Sivakami knows it will be all over the marketplace by sundown. Muchami has already been instructed to confirm and clarify rumours. Sivakami sits up with her beading long into that night, thinking how nice it would have been to find a note from her husband testifying that his son was one of his successes, how nice it would have been to show Vairum something like that.

WHILE SIVAKAMI IS WORKING UP THE NERVE to talk to Chinnarathnam about Vairum’s condition, she has been taking measures of her own. Each night before Vairum goes to sleep, she has rubbed veeboothi on the patch of white, which has become increasingly solid in only a few days. Vairum asks what she is doing, but she refuses to tell him and perhaps he senses how serious she is because this is one of the few instances in which he obeys her and submits, both to the topical application of the ash and to a pinch Sivakami makes him ingest, which she administers with more mutterings.

It is the third morning after she noticed the freckles, and Gayatri comes, as she has made a practice of doing daily, to drink a cup of coffee and play a game of palanguzhi with Vairum. The coffee-drinking is proof of her modernity; Sivakami never touches the stuff. When they sit down, Gayatri says to the little boy, “Go wipe your mouth, squirt. You left some yogourt in the corner from breakfast. I’ll set up.” She starts counting cowries into the small bowls carved into each side of the board. “Is the game of fours all right, or do you want the twelves again?”

“Twelves,” Vairum replies. He likes this game best: twelve cowries in each of the three bowls to either side of the centre bowl, which is empty at the start but accumulates cowries, round after round, like a bank. Either player—if he or she counts right—can claim either bank, even both. Vairum feels intoxicated by the sight of the cowries piling up and even overflowing a central bowl as the game progresses.

He returns and Gayatri says, “You go first.” She looks at him closely. “You missed it again. Don’t you know how to wipe your face?”

“I did it.” He swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand.

Gayatri frowns and, grasping his chin, tilts his face up. “Sivakamikka,” she calls, letting go and rubbing her hand on her sari. “Have a look at this.”

Sivakami comes from the pantry, already knowing what Gayatri is going to tell her.

Gayatri fetches her father-in-law at Sivakami’s request. He comes and has a look at the new white patch, which has appeared like the beginnings of a clown’s mouth around Vairum’s frown, as the little boy huddles defiantly in a corner of the main hall, playing palanguzhi solitaire, barely looking up when he is asked.

“I’m sure it is not what you think it is,” Chinnarathnam calls to Sivakami, who is staying decorously out of sight in the pantry. “My advice is that you have a licensed medical practitioner come and see the child.”

“What is it, Amma?” Vairum says, rising.

“It’s nothing, child,” says Chinnarathnam. “We will have it looked after. I know an LMP,” he says to Sivakami, using the English acronym. “He comes through Kulithalai once weekly. I will call for him.”

Chinnarathnam and his son (Gayatri’s husband—the man who has been called Minister since he was small, though he holds no official post yet) arrive with the LMP a few days later. Chinnarathnam will mediate because Sivakami will not come out in front of the LMP, nor speak to him directly.

The LMP examines the child. Palpating the patches, he asks, “Can you feel this? Is it numb?” Vairum looks at him with a catlike expression of defiant incomprehension until Chinnarathnam gently asks him, “Vairum. Tell him, little one—does it hurt?”

“No,” Vairum grunts, but the LMP sighs sharply and repeats,

“No—
numb.
Can he feel anything at all?”

“Ah, yes,” Chinnarathnam clucks with mock humility, the sound conveying the superiority landed gentry feel toward the working man. “My apologies. Child, can you feel this man’s fingers on your face?”

“Of course,” Vairum snorts.

Chinnarathnam smiles at the LMP, who is officiously not making eye contact with anyone as he continues pressing Vairum in other places and firing off further questions, interrupting their replies.

“It’s called vitiligo,” he finally grunts, repacking his black bag. “A condition of the skin: not painful, not contagious, as far as we know, and incurable. Do you understand?”

Chinnarathnam smiles. “So it is not”—he drops to a whisper—“leprosy ? This is what the child’s mother fears.”

“No, no, no. Damned village superstition.” The LMP leans in to Chinnarathnam, who leans away from his overfamiliarity and smell of sweat. “My mother thinks the same way. We must impress upon these people that it is quite different.”

Chinnarathnam sees the doctor to the door and instructs Minister to walk him to the end of the Brahmin quarter and bid him farewell.

He then comes back to the rear of the main hall and asks, “Sivakami? What do you think?”

Muchami is waiting in the garden to relay her response to Chinnarathnam. Sivakami is aware of the unusual importance of re-enlisting the servant in her son’s care—she has always felt that when Muchami looks after Vairum, he is overcoming some native distaste. Now she has to persuade him that Vairum’s condition won’t affect him—before trying to persuade the entire Brahmin quarter of the same.

“I am quite satisfied,” she says, with forced authority.

Muchami conveys this to Chinnarathnam with a passable imitation of her quavery confidence.

“What do you think?”

“Yes, it confirms what I thought,” Chinnarathnam says, polite but genuinely relieved. “There is no way that a child being raised in such hygienic and sheltered surroundings could have contracted... the l-word.”

Muchami relates this to Sivakami verbatim, again bringing his skills in mimicry to bear.

“But now you must do something for the boy’s condition.”

“Mm, yes,” Sivakami hurries to agree. “I want to pledge a golden armour for the Rathnagirishwarar Lingam. Vairum can carry it up the hill to give.”

“A very good idea for skin maladies. Shall I order that for you? There is one Kulithalai goldsmith I trust to do a very good job.”

Sivakami consents.

“May I also suggest a puja to ward off possible ill effects of the planets?” Chinnarathnam continues. “One relative of mine, he had exactly the same condition, and an astrologer advised the family that it was a time of bad planetary alignments for the man. I can’t remember which... Saturn? Venus? Something not good. I can call an astrologer for you, also. There is one man here your late husband respected.”

Sivakami thinks this a very good idea.

When Chinnarathnam goes, Vairum, who, despite his theatrical displays of uninterest, has been paying close attention to these exchanges, runs straight to Muchami, who shrinks from him.

“What’s wrong with me?” the little boy demands.

“Nothing, sir.” Muchami shakes his head insistently. “Don’t you worry yourself about this. Come on, I have time for a round of dayakkattam. Come chalk the board on the courtyard. Come.”

This is a house without mirrors, and so until Vairum leaves it to go out into the world, he will have to take Muchami at his word.

THE OLD MEN AND WOMEN who had been in Hanumarathnam’s employ have, after years of pretending they were too old to work, finally grown into their pretense. Sivakami asks Muchami if his wife would like a job.

He doesn’t see why she wouldn’t. So Mari begins, only an hour or two daily at first, then staying to serve Muchami his mid-morning meal, and then staying to help with the late-afternoon cleaning. She is appropriately shy and deferential with her husband and his employer, but her strength of personality is evident. Like Gayatri, Mari is a confident young woman who did not know Hanumarathnam and who therefore comes unaccompanied by residual sadness. Unlike Gayatri, however, Mari is very strict in religious observance. One of the reasons she wants to spend time with Sivakami is to learn the practices of the caste she considers closest to God.

Mari appears determined to make herself a Brahmin woman in every way she can—which is to say, every way except birth, marriage and where she makes her home. Since everyone in Cholapatti considers Sivakami a paragon of Brahmin widowhood, Mari replicates all her habits, which are, apart from her shaven head and white sari, simply orthodox practices that any person with deep concern for his or her spiritual well-being might adopt. Most often, Brahmin men and women take on these renunciations late in life, when their children are gone and their material obligations with them. But Mari is impatient to improve her spiritual welfare and starts immediately. She maintains madi from sun-up to sundown. She takes food prepared only by her own hand, or Sivakami’s. She refuses foods such as
pazhiah sadam, dosai
and
idli,
which involve fermentation; at home, she will eat only food cooked the same day, and if it’s not available, she eats raw fruit. It’s a sacrifice but she relishes it. Visibly.

Almost all the Brahmins on Sivakami’s street who learn of Mari’s imitations are flattered; she basks in their approval. She knows many in her own community are contemptuous; she takes their contempt as proof of her success. But Gayatri, who comes over daily to keep Sivakami up to the minute on gossip and opinions, new purchases and the news of the day, is openly amused by Mari’s pretensions. She unapologetically drinks her daily cup of coffee at Sivakami’s, teasing Mari about it, pressing her to imbibe. Worse, Gayatri never once says she wishes she could be so strict with herself. It is of Gayatri alone that Mari might be jealous—not because she wants to be like Gayatri, but because Gayatri doesn’t want to be like her.

And now Vairum, in Sivakami’s opinion, is refusing to become what he already is, what he was meant to be. After all her efforts in bringing him back here, he will not attend school.

Thangam, despite being the elder, spends all her days on the veranda. She has small chores to do, a few minutes of helping her mother with food preparation, a few minutes of embroidery, which she does without resistance or engagement. Always the children await her outside, from first light to dusk. She is not likely to attend school, but Sivakami registers her, hoping this might goad Vairum into it too. When Sivakami reminds him of the ceremony of rebirth he so proudly undertook in Samanthibakkam, saying that his education commenced with that moment, he replies, “So take me back there so I can start school. I told you, that’s what I’m waiting for.”

She jabs her hand in the general direction of her brothers’ house. “If you go back to Samanthibakkam, the school you will go to will make of you nothing more than a Brahmin.”

“I am a Brahmin,” says her son.

“Yes,” she cries, “you are already a Brahmin, and I think you can become something more, if you go to a proper school.”

“Well, I don’t want to and I won’t!” He stomps upstairs, to the attic room he has begun to adopt as his refuge.

Gayatri, who arrived early in this conversation, signals to Sivakami that she will go after him. She mounts the stairs and persuades him to come down for their twice-weekly palanguzhi match, and, as usual, he does multiplication tables under his breath between turns at the cowries. Today, she casually inquires, “Do you have any idea how much more maths you will learn, how much more math there is to learn, by going to school? You can’t imagine.” For her trouble, she receives a scowl.

Muchami also makes his contributions to the campaign. Sivakami overhears him at the close of a game of courtyard tic-tac-toe, saying, “Look, I beat you. Me, your family servant. Go to school, little boy, or that is going to happen more and more.”

It is Minister, Gayatri’s husband, who makes the obvious suggestion. “Bribe the boy!” he proposes in his marvellously English-accented Tamil. Only a would-be politician would think of this, but Gayatri agrees it is a simple and brilliant solution.