The Toss of a Lemon (33 page)

Once she stopped yelling, he explained to her in soft tones what was happening. She continued to cry softly on his shoulder; he carried her back through the garden to the courtyard, where she changed clothes and came back through the house to take Rukmini’s hand on the veranda. She follows her routine for the rest of the day, though from time to time hiccups rack her little chest and tears track the peach-fuzz cheeks as she doggedly helps Mari to sort the rice or Muchami to feed the cows.

The next train is now not for two hours, and they wait nervously for Goli to come, ready to spring into action again. Two hours pass, then four. Muchami has moved the bullock every hour, to try to keep it in the shade. Finally seven hours after he first hollered, Goli leaps up behind the bullock and hollers again. As Murthy makes Thangam and the two youngest children comfortable in the cart, Sivakami attempts a few civil words with her daughter’s husband.

“I understand you will next be shifting house at about the time we will celebrate my son’s first Pongal with his new bride, but perhaps it will be too much to come with the babies and return in time to take up your next posting...”

“How’s that? Preposterous!” Goli sounds as though he is addressing a crowd. “Would my wife miss her dear little brother’s first real pot of pongal?”

“Also because Thangam’s perhaps not strong enough...”

“Preposterous!” Goli snaps his shoulder towel at the bullock’s rump to punctuate his exclamation. The bullock jolts forward and lumbers the cart around the corner with Muchami looking like there must be some better way.

Sivakami expects, for a time, an indignant reaction from Goli’s parents. Indeed, she hopes for one. In her mind, she challenges them to fight for the babies. If they do, she will allow them to take the children. It is only right for children to live with paternal grandparents. Goli and Thangam are moving everywhere, helter-skelter, but strictly because Goli’s job requires it. They stay in various places. They live with Goli’s parents.

The paternal grandparents never challenge Sivakami. She assumes they don’t have the energy or interest, let alone the will, to raise a brood. Their efforts on Goli’s behalf appear to have been desultory, or ineffective: the results were not, she admits, very cheering.

They also perhaps haven’t the means to take a child or children in. Not only do they not object, they don’t offer assistance, nor do they even ask how she will keep them. But this is the question Sivakami must now confront.

She is the caretaker of her son’s property. None of this, not the house, nor trees, nor lands, nor cows, belongs to her. It is her son’s duty to support her, but his property does not belong to her, and it certainly would not be proper to use it to support a daughter of the family, or that daughter’s children. She had written to Vairum to tell him that Thangam’s daughter will now live with them, but had offered no explanations or ramifications, and he didn’t ask for any. Perhaps he didn’t want to repeat in writing the arguments they have had about Goli. She recalls his suggesting Thangam continue to live with them; he clearly would not object to her children doing so.

There is the income from the lands her brothers have been purchasing and managing on Thangam’s behalf. But who knows how many children Thangam will have? How many girls’ weddings to pay for, how many boys’ schoolings? Sivakami’s brothers are condescending, but they don’t condescend to share many details of their acquisitions, especially since Sivakami made it clear that she is fully capable of understanding anything they choose to tell her. They are not particularly shrewd or active managers. Chances are that the income from those lands would not support the day-to-day costs of Thangam’s family, which gives indications of growing large, in addition to the special costs of festivals and ceremonies. Goli’s parents’ lands would not feed their grandchildren, neither in their possession or in the hands of others. And Goli, well, it’s probably safe to say accounting is not one of his primary interests.

Since Thangam’s children will not be supported by any of the overt and respectable channels, Sivakami must gain access to a wealth whose existence depends on a measure of disrespect.

She doesn’t know if her brothers suffered pangs of loss when she bundled up her offspring and rejected their plans, but then she didn’t show them her pain at this parting, either. What was evident and accepted was that this action hurt their pride. If their relationship to her was not outwardly defined by affection, it was defined by duty, and if their duty was to carry out the responsibilities of the children’s dead father, to get the girl married and the boy educated, it was her duty to comply with their image of themselves. Sivakami broke this implied covenant, apparently without a backward glance. Now, despite her having broken one agreement, she needs them to comply with another.

Manjakkani
is an inheritance customarily passed from mother to daughter to daughter. Literally, this translates as “yellow money,” as though this land, or money, or jewels, were rubbed with turmeric, as is the thread of the thirumangalyam that knots a woman into married life, as is a woman’s skin, freshened by the cut edge of that root on finishing her bath.

Many a woman does not receive her manjakkani. Many a woman, married by the time her mother dies, is convinced by her brothers that they need not give her the mother’s wealth. She is well enough provided for, they say, and her husband would get it if they gave it to her, and so better it should stay in the family. Many a woman buys this line.

Sivakami’s mother, though, on her deathbed, called to her side her only surviving daughter. There, in confidence, she told Sivakami about the battle she had fought with her own brothers, her mother’s battle against the mother’s brothers, and so on and up and down through the generations to defend the wealth of the family’s women.

“God’s grace, you will never need this money, as, God’s grace, I didn‘t,” she had croaked. “But you may. And even if, by God’s grace, you don’t, your daughter may. You must therefore fight for it, as I did, and my mother, and my mother’s mother...” Sivakami’s mother trailed off, exhausted, a jewel of spittle nestled in the skin around her mouth.

And Sivakami, though she was very young, newly widowed, not sure how she could afford to confront her brothers, not certain that the unpleasantness would be worthwhile, promised, because what else could she give her mother then? Sivakami was to blame for her husband’s death. So, too, for her mother’s, whose death proceeded from his.

She had followed her mother’s directions and obtained, from a trustee, the document stating the value of lands and gold that should be passed into Sivakami’s hands. Now she takes from her safe that yellowed parchment, written by a scribe, inscribed by a judge, stamped with a seal, listing the deeds to three plots of land, adjacent to one another, and a
kaasu maalai,
a necklace of coins weighing eighteen sovereigns. Accompanying the testament is a letter from her mother saying that the ownership of the land transfers to her daughter upon her death. The necklace had come to Sivakami upon her marriage and had been passed to Thangam at hers. The plots of land—large, fertile grounds with old tenants, midway between Sivakami’s native village and Cholapatti—are being managed by her brothers. All these years, the income from the plots of land has been going into the family coffers—her brothers’. Sivakami does not begrudge them the income so far. If she had continued to live with them, it would have in some way paid for her and her children.

Sivakami replaces the keys to the safe beneath the loose brick and sits on the floor by the door to the garden, in view of the back room where all her grandchildren have slipped and burst into the world. The light from the garden billows and waves like long gauzy curtains on her left. Before her is a floor desk, a foot high at the near end and sloping up to a height of sixteen inches. She pulls it toward her and smoothes the uneven yellowy paper against the jackwood surface.

Her mother and grandmother fought their battles against their brothers in British courts. Sivakami doesn’t know how their fore-mothers fought before the British; she knows only how she must wage her struggle.

She takes a slate from within the low desk and makes a few calculations based on her knowledge of crops and yields and the recent strengths and weaknesses of the regional agricultural economy. She regards these for a few moments, then lifts the lid of the desk once more and tucks the slate into a ledger within. She sends Muchami to fetch a scribe, the son of the man Hanumarathnam retained all those years ago.

Sivakami is not illiterate, but, with no formal schooling, writing is a labour for her, and her nibs are not really of a quality appropriate to matters of importance. Vairum can write fluently, and has good pens, with proper ink, not the powdered stuff, but it is some time before his next visit. In any case, this letter would take some explaining and this is her initiative alone for now.

Muchami escorts the scribe into the courtyard and enters the house to bring out the small desk. The scribe, seated on the cobblestones, pulls the desk to and arranges upon it his pen, ink and parchment. He confirms that Sivakami, who sits, almost out of view, in the kitchen, has her own wax and seal.

She begins dictating and he writes with terrific grace and fluency, in perfectly straight rows with many flourishes. Muchami watches from the side, his mouth slightly open. He is fascinated by letters and words, the ability to drop them from pen onto paper and pick them up again in recitation.

Twice the scribe makes suggestions as to wording, and Sivakami accepts his suggestions. Though young, he has a lot of experience with official correspondence. He meticulously blots the first copy and places it on the warm stones to dry while he bends to the task of preparing a duplicate.

Sivakami reads the first copy and places it in the safe along with the testament and her mother’s letter. She takes out a coin for Muchami to pay the scribe and tells him to pass on her regards to his father, who has inked letters for the town of Kulithalai for more than thirty years. She places the second copy, still slightly damp, at the feet of her gods, prostrates herself before them and sits back on her heels. After a few moments she rises and, by the light of the ghee lamps, readies the letter to go out in the morning mail. She folds it carefully into a homemade envelope and heats a stub of wax marbled with smoke. The wax liquefies and is about to drip when she notices some dusky gold motes on the paper. They must have been carried, clinging to the document, from the courtyard cobblestones. She tries to blow the motes off of the envelope, but it is too late. The wax drips and churns up the gold flecks. Taking up the brass seal engraved with her husband’s initials, she aims and presses.

The wax cools and hardens quickly. Sivakami runs her finger over the cold seal, and then presses her left thumb to it, so long and hard that her husband’s initials are depressed in the pad of her digit. She watches the impression fade by the buttery lamplight until her thumb is once again grooved only with that signature which is hers alone, flecked with the odd dot of gold, like the sign of her husband on the fateful letter.

Sivakami’s letter reads: