The Toss of a Lemon (29 page)

“High time to organize, man!” Ranga Chettiar exhorts Gopi by way of a greeting, as though they are in the middle of a conversation. Ranga’s youngest son has initiated a Chettiar Uplift and Cultural Preservation Society in Kulithalai and Ranga appears to have made it a project to needle Gopi—either pressing him for more support, financial and otherwise, than he is inclined to give, or suggesting backhandedly that he is a potential beneficiary. Vairum thinks often about this pair: same caste background, but such different fortunes. What has caused one to succeed and the other to fail, apart from dumb luck?

“Has your son made contact with the Justice Party?” Minister asks Ranga, not changing the subject but deflecting it from his guest.

“Oh, quite,” Ranga replies, in a gay, vague tone: he clearly has no idea.

“It’s a natural fit—I’m sure other Chettiar organizations are getting behind them,” Minister presses charmingly.

The South Indian Liberal Federation, increasingly called the “Justice” Party after its English-language daily, was founded by well-educated and generally well-off non-Brahmins. It is dedicated to opposing the independence movement, whose ranks are dominated by Brahmins: while Justice Party-ites murmur that of course all Indians want independence, they are devoted to preventing its realization at present because of the fear that, under current conditions, an independently governed India means a Brahmin-governed India. They will gain an ear among Brits who, regarding the Jew Montagu with no little disapproval, understand antipathy to moneyed minorities with aspirations to govern.

Minister, ever the cross-caste campaigner, is promoting the party among his non-Brahmin associates. He’s certain Justice will make a successful run. Even though, as a Brahmin, he can’t join the party, he wants to ensure he has many fingers in their pie.

“It’s a self-destructive concept, a non-Brahmin organization!” expostulates Dr. Kittu. “Moneyed non-Brahmins have no more in common with one another than they do with Brahmins. Except in this one enterprise, you fellows are always competing, always trying to set yourselves apart from one another.” He turns on Minister, his fellow Brahmin, with gentler reproach. “You shouldn’t be encouraging them.”

Minister performs a likable shrug and offers the doctor a plate of assorted sweets. Later this year, he will stand for his first election: he hopes to make the leap from Taluk to District Board. In part, Vairum knows, these men gather here daily because they believe he will succeed—he is the best-connected man in the district and increasingly relied upon for those connections. These men connect to one another through him. Maybe someday, Vairum thinks, he, too, will be such a hub. Not for politics, though. He knows that already.

Rama Sastri, whose attention is rarely held by the conversation but seems, to Vairum, not to have anything else to do, has spotted the letters page and is frowning at the circled item.

“Special interest here, wot?” He flourishes it inquiringly, and Dr. Kittu irritably snatches it.

Mani Iyer, reading over the doctor’s shoulder, starts, hurt in his voice. “Daily there are these criticisms of Mrs. Besant—”

“Drivel!” says the doctor. “Muckrakers!”

“Oh, now, gentlemen,” Minister sighs sympathetically. “Why would we trust self-hating Britons to give us guidance? But that’s not why I circled that item. What do you think of the prose?”

Rama Sastri re-examines and reads the letter aloud with special emphases to show he has solved the puzzle. “Do we have a stylist in our midst?” He pops his monocle and moues at Minister, who giggles in response.

“What’s so special about it?” Muthu Reddiar asks thickly as the others attempt to look knowledgeably disengaged, and Vairum is reassured to see that there are others here who are trying to hide their confusion, as well as at least one person who doesn’t mind showing it.

HER BROTHERS HAD BEEN RIGHT: Vairum is leaving her. Sivakami had known this, and still, boldly, baldly, made her choice.

The seventeen-year-old Vairum, though, looks indisputably happy and proud. His valise is packed, his shoes shined; Rukmini, Gayatri, Minister and their children, and Vairum’s math teacher are gathered for the send-off. Murthy will escort Vairum and get him settled in the dormitory. Sivakami has nearly finished assembling a tiffin for them to eat on the train.

Muchami comes to the kitchen entrance to say the bullock cart is ready. With little to take, Vairum could easily have walked to the station, but what sort of fare-thee-well would that have been for a young man off to attend St. Joseph’s College in Thiruchi?

Always, Sivakami glances at Muchami’s face to gauge her own emotions, but today his expression is not her own. No one feels about her son as she does. Muchami has concern for the child, and pity, and the restrained affection that develops with proximity, but does not have Sivakami’s passionate protectiveness. His pity is reflexive: Vairum is a child without friends. He is thought so sharp and so bright as to be unassailable. Even Gayatri, despite an interest in Vairum’s welfare, feels no fear on his behalf. Thangam is not here to show affection toward her little brother, and so Sivakami alone worries for the diamond-hard boy. She knows he will succeed, at college and afterward. He will become all he was meant to be. So what is she worried about? She has the feeling that if she could see far enough into his dark eyes, she would know, but Vairum doesn’t let her look.

Sivakami speaks in tones alternately too brusque and too indulgent : Has Vairum packed twenty neem sticks for his teeth in case he couldn’t find a good tree right away? And what about the shoe polish Minister brought him from Thiruchi?

“I can buy shoe polish there!” Vairum says.

“Obviously: that’s where he bought it,” she says, peevish now. “But we have no use for it here!”

Vairum has no patience for his mother’s sentimentality. He wants to rush out, rush forward. He hears the bullock snort and stamp outside.

Sivakami is not finished. “Every mother who permits her son to leave her asks him for a promise. I am the same as every mother.”

Vairum looks away from her, toward the door.

“Look at me,” Sivakami says. He looks at her feet. “Your father’s first wife was lost in the river which connects our small village to Thiruchi. I worship our Kaveri Mata daily, the river that gives us life. I ask her to spare the precious lives of our children. Promise me.” Sivakami strains toward him. “Promise you will not swim in that river. You drink her water, your clothes are washed in her flow. That’s enough. Boys will try to tempt you...”

Fat chance, thinks Vairum. Muchami reads it on his face.

“It will look like fun, but I cannot afford this. It is sacrifice enough to send you so far.”

Vairum looks troubled. “The cost, Amma?” He thought he knew all their financial ins and outs. They can afford this.

“The cost of losing you, to the city, to the river, to ...” She can’t go on.

Minister clears his throat, steps in. “Promise your mother, and then look lively. Only twenty-five minutes till the train.” He nods at Muchami, who picks up the valise.

Vairum mumbles something.

“Huh?” The volume of Sivakami’s voice startles both her son and herself.

“I promise, good?” he repeats. “Can I go?”

Sivakami is seeing two scenes at once. She watches her son mount the cart—shiny dark shoes and shiny dark head and large, slim hands dangling from thin adolescent arms, his father’s hands, but for a large white patch emerging from one sleeve and encompassing two knuckles—as she also sees a moment from their past: their family, wading into the Kaveri. She recalls the feeling of her hair ravelling its binds and floating up in the breeze cooling itself along the water. Baby Vairum, arms clasped around her knees as Muchami calls to him from farther out in the current. Hanumarathnam, helping little Thangam out of her paavaadai on the bank.

Watching Muchami help Murthy into the cart, she feels as though she is looking at and through the river’s surface, seeing her own world reflected and also seeing the otherworld of fishes and insects. The otherworld of her memory feels at least as real: Muchami is several steps out in the river, the water only as deep as his shins. Vairum lets go of Sivakami one hand at a time with Muchami’s wiry grasp around his chubby baby elbows. Delighted, he floats in the water, little-boy face to the sun, with Muchami squatting, holding him up. Hanumarathnam squats to do the same for Thangam, but she doesn’t float. He tries to lift her from the armpits, but she’s too heavy. Hanumarathnam falls, a big splash, and gets up laughing. Thangam splashes, too, slaps the water in excitement, then covers her mouth with her hands. Sivakami claps in excitement, and Vairum claps, too, laughing in the sun. Oh, those eyes.

Before her now, in the Brahmin quarter, the bullock’s back gleams, then dulls with dust up the fatty hump. The tail flicks once as the cart rocks around the corner and away. Vairum doesn’t look back. No weeping crowd, no running children. There are no rituals for bidding farewell to a son.

THIRUCHINAPALLI.

Vairum has read up a little on the history of the city, poring through the Trichinopoly District
Gazetteer
at Minister’s house. He likes the British spelling—as though Thiruchi were a transplanted Greek city. In any case, this has been universally shortened to “Trichy” or “Thiruchi”—certain names are a mouthful for Tamils and non-Tamils uniformly. Families of the region, though, call the city Kottai—fort—for the city’s most prominent feature, a small mountain fortified by the illustrious Nayaks in their reign, now the site of the city’s favoured temple.

Kottai is the last stop before Thiruchi Junction, and Vairum remembers, when he was eleven and just learning to keep track of such things, panicking when he saw that Minister, who had brought him to Thiruchi on their annual shoe-buying trip, wasn’t moving. He only knew Thiruchi by this name and naturally thought they were missing their stop. Minister laughed and patted his knee. “Kottai is Kottai, m’boy, and Trichy is Trichy. See?” he said, pointing at the sign as they pulled into the main station.

Vairum shakes his head at the memory as they pull into the big station now. He was so green! Murthy is still drowsing, his head lolling to all points of the compass, and Vairum shakes him. He waits for the two immense, slumbering barristers opposite them to wake and arrange themselves so he can extract his valise from behind their legs—brothers, they had explained in the early part of the journey, when everyone was alert and conversational. The young barristers, who were in Kulithalai doing an official and personal favour for an old friend, are also St. Joseph’s alumni and heartily pleased to meet the young admittee. They are so obese that each occupies nearly half the wooden bench, their legs dangling forward over the below-bench storage area like mahogany pillars in some hall of justice.

As the train halts, Murthy wakes, smacking his lips, and rearranges his oily
kudumi
—the hairstyle, front of the head shaved, the rest in a ponytail, has not yet been thrust from fashion by British influence—so that it is equally but differently dishevelled. “We’re here.”

It seems to Vairum that the equivalent of the entire population of Kulithalai streams past on the platform. The thrill of arrival in the city never seems to diminish. And now he is to live here!

The barristers awaken with snorts, compose their linen jackets, put on their Parsi-style caps. Murthy follows them to the door with Vairum’s suitcase and they exchange addresses on the platform. The lawyers will change trains here to return home, and Murthy and Vairum are cordially invited to visit if ever they find themselves in Pandiyoor, a market town in the Madurai district.

Murthy leads Vairum along the platform, past the first- and second-class resting rooms, past the steamy tiffin stand, past the small station offices panelled in dark wood and full of uniformed men with moustaches, toward the exit, beyond which the city quivers, mirage-like and muscular.

Late that afternoon, back in Cholapatti, Sivakami has cooked a lot of food and is wondering who will eat it. She has little appetite.

She wanders into the garden. The birds are getting active in anticipation of the evening cool, and the yard seems very loud. Was it this loud when Vairum was still here? She checks on the progress of the papaya, notes the coconut palms look a bit dry. From the northeast, she can hear hoots of young male laughter—the Brahmin quarter’s youth gathering to go to Kulithalai for an evening of loitering in the market square. Muchami tells her that the ones with money play cards at the club. She imagines her Samanthibakkam nephews doing exactly the same. Nice boys, but not brilliant. What if she had stayed, and seen those boys going to secular schools, and her own son in a mediocre local paadasaalai? He would have grown bitter, sharper than any of them, but with no potential to earn. His cousins were friendly when they were small, but during ten years of living on her brothers’ goodwill, their relations would have changed. It wouldn’t have been charity ; she would have paid all of her own costs and Vairum’s, but no one would have been permitted to know or acknowledge this; that would be bad form. Vairum would not have been the king of that household, the way he is here, in his own home. She imagines her nephews calling Vairum’s name and laughing.