The Toss of a Lemon (34 page)

She had signed her name herself, volunteering as the owlish young scribe penned the last words, to spare him the awkwardness of either presuming she could write her name or asking her for a thumbprint.

She feels proud and nervous about her letter: this was a hard bit of business. And when, after a month, she has received no reply, she sends another letter. It summarizes the first in brief, in case they hadn’t received it. It also says that Muchami will be coming on the seventh day of the next lunar month. She receives no reply to the second letter either.

MUCHAMI DISMOUNTS THE TRAIN and tidies himself on the platform, meticulously smoothing dhoti, towel and kudumi. Finding his way to the first of the plots, he introduces himself to the men he finds in two huts side by side, at the corners of two sub-plots, farmed by brothers.

Muchami is not surprised to be gravely informed by these men that the tenants have been told not to pay him a single paisa. Muchami doesn’t know Sivakami’s brothers, but their behaviour is predictable to him. People are very generous about such matters as hospitality, but that is because they must be. Hospitality is required, by society and religion. It often costs very little, and it gains a person cosmic points. Generosity with property inheritance is quite a different matter-especially when the inheritor is a woman. There are so many ways to justify bilking someone. Muchami frankly admits—to himself and to Sivakami—that he would challenge his own sisters in just the same way, should they ever lay a claim to his mother’s wealth. Not that she has any, but if she did, he would try to keep it. As the male issue, he was charged with the responsibility for his mother. He might someday have his own inheritors to consider. His sisters left the family when they married. They are not suffering for money. Let their husbands take care of them. He can easily imagine Sivakami’s brothers’ thoughts.

Muchami makes his rounds of the tenants, just to check the information he’s been given. They are a little suspicious of his youth and cowed by the brilliance of his dhoti and the confidence with which he wields his walking stick. He speaks their language, though his accent is a little strange, being from that country to the southeast. They do not make eye contact with him, but they answer his questions in the affirmative : yes, they have been told not to give him any money.

Muchami knows better than to try to muscle them. They are not refusing to pay rent, they are simply refusing to pay it to Muchami. Sivakami’s brothers will not cease to demand their share, and these are poor people. They cannot pay twice. Muchami does not put pressure on them that would catch them between landlords. This feudal feud is between Sivakami and her brothers. He goes home.

When he gives his report in Cholapatti, Sivakami is no more surprised than he was. This is a strategic game. She advances to the next level of play. She informs her brothers that she is legally entitled to the income from that land and that if they do not observe this entitlement, she will find some means of enforcing her right.

At least this merits a response. Sambu, her eldest and most pompous brother, reminds her on behalf of their side that she is a woman. She has no legal entitlement. Her legal identity resided in her husband and they are very regretful to have to remind her that he is no more. Poof went her legal existence, up in smoke and ash.

Sivakami, as might well be imagined, has not forgotten her legal and social status any more than she has forgotten that her mother intended for her to have that money. Her son has, as everyone knows, the right to act on her behalf in legal matters. Funny her brothers didn’t remind her of this, too, in the course of all their other reminders. Perhaps they themselves forgot.

Some months have now passed since Sivakami’s initial efforts, and Vairum’s first Pongal as a married man is impending. To her brothers’ recent disdainful volley, Sivakami replies with only a gilt-edged invitation—modern, as Vairum had insisted. Further pleading, in her solitary, feminine voice, will be of no use. Vairum must now become involved in the claim. She will consult with him over the holiday and they will draft a response together.

SIVAKAMI BUZZES AROUND HAPPILY, arranging the house. Straight from college, Vairum will go to collect Vani, her parents and seven or eight other relatives and escort them to Cholapatti. It is out of his way and protocol certainly does not require him to go, but he will miss no opportunity to pass time in the company of his young bride. His affection and regard for her are so great as to be almost improper. Sivakami doesn’t know it, but Vairum had journeyed to Vani’s village about six weeks earlier, at the halfway mark between their first Deepavali and their first Pongal. He had gone alone and on some highly flimsy pretense. His in-laws might have been suspicious, had he not won them over with his good manners and respect. He made no attempt to speak to Vani, though everyone saw him looking and smiled behind their hands. Clearly, he had been properly brought up, poor boy, he was just enraptured by the household’s well-favoured daughter.

The party arrive at an auspicious hour on Friday, late afternoon. Vairum leaves them at the Kulithalai chattram to freshen up, dashes home and can barely greet his mother through his throat-clenching excitement, then dashes back again to fetch his bride and her family.

Sivakami watches for them from her door. As they round the corner, Vairum appears so relaxed and expansive that, for a shocking moment, his own mother doesn’t recognize him. He makes some small joke. Sivakami watches his face through the dusk, laughing, lit from the pale glow that hangs round Vani’s visage, the moon shining through mist.

Vani is growing from a pretty child into an unusual-looking young woman, with a wide face, bluish-black hair and ivory skin, the legacy of some west-coast ancestor. But there is something about her that strikes the viewer as odd—her movements are not jerky but give the impression of being unconnected one to another, just as she seems unconnected to the world around her. And yet here: she is laughing at something Vairum said. She accepts him, she likes him, she puts him at his ease! For this, Sivakami murmurs a prayer of thanks, and another as they enter.

The evening passes pleasantly in chat and feasting. Vairum’s new relatives are prosperous, educated, confident in the art of gay conversation. They are modern—witness their willingness to permit their daughter to exhibit her talents publicly in such forums as weddings—and accomplished—the family not only includes several rising lawyers, but a poet, a dramatist and a member of parliament—but characterized more by their passionate eccentricities. Vani’s mother, for instance, is a collector of vintage and antique armaments. Her father had been good friends with a British Army chief of staff, who got her interested when she was a little girl. Vani’s father is developing a set of calisthenics based on theories of yoga and medieval humours. The practitioner ingests and expels liquids at different points in the exercise routine, drinking five different juices and herbal extracts, as well as spitting, sweating, crying, leeching and urinating. They and the other family members chat about their pastimes, about politics and culture, while Vani sits quietly in their midst, not appearing, really, to be listening.

She is a little like Thangam in this sense, Sivakami must admit. Unlike Thangam, however, Vani’s contented silence is regularly broken : during mealtimes, the girl unannouncedly begins to rattle on with abandon. Sivakami finds Vani’s chatter far more unnerving than her silence, not only the suddenness of it, but the volume. Streams of stories rocket forth from the child while her food goes ignored. Her family accommodates seamlessly, reducing their own output and confining their topics to those that complement hers. Evidently, Vani’s exhibition is a longstanding habit. Vairum leans forward and gapes without cease as though the words are nectar he would drink from Vani’s rosebud lips, oysters he would suck from between her pearly teeth. Sivakami can see she will need to learn to tolerate Vani’s odd habits, but this does not seem a high price for the happiness she can feel radiating from her son. She has not seen him so joyful and comfortable since ... since, she thinks resignedly, before he left the house of his uncles.

And now, sometime over the holiday, she must ask him to take those uncles to court.

She doesn’t introduce the topic immediately. Several of her brothers have come to witness the celebration, and it seems neither wise nor polite to raise the topic when they are so near. They are warm and effusive toward her and avoid, with what appears to her an effort at grace, any mention of their exchange. She surmises that they think their hasty and factually incorrect letter has won them this battle. She meekly serves all, showing gracious hospitality, and lets them think what they want.

She introduces the topic with Vairum as soon as her brothers leave, immediately after the morning meal on the Sunday, the day of the dawn celebration, when first light saw Vani stir the first milk into the first pongal pot of her married life. Vairum is rather at loose ends, since Vani, her mother and the two unmarried paternal uncles, who will linger a couple of days in Cholapatti, have all gone to pay some obligatory calls. He sits before the floor desk with a slate for rough work, a copy book for fine work and an advanced physical chemistry text on the floor beside him.

He has turned the desk to face the door of the garden, ostensibly to receive a little of the breeze. Sivakami, at work cutting vegetables in the doorway of the pantry, watches him for a few moments and sees that he is staring out the garden door and not at his slate and paper. Every quarter-hour or so, he starts, as though a bubble around his head has burst, and bends with violent discipline toward the desk. But little by little, as though his chin is being lifted by an unseen finger, his head rises until his gaze again dreamily mixes with the morning sunshine, the sounds and smells of the drowsy garden. Sivakami watches him go through this cycle three times before she decides his assignments cannot be terribly urgent. She snaps the blade down into its block and goes to crouch beside him.

His instinct with his mother is always to look self-important and preoccupied, but brusqueness is, in this moment, too great a reach. He succeeds only in looking as though he just woke up.

“Do you recall your grandmother?” Sivakami asks. Her carefully chosen opening line only disorients Vairum further.

“I thought my grandmother died when my father was small,” he says cautiously.

“Oh, yes, no—that is to say, my mother.”

“No.” He is trying. “I don’t think I do.”

“You were very small when she used to come and visit us here.”

“I was very small when my father died, and I remember him.”

Sivakami was unprepared for this but tries not to show it. “You remember him?”

“Yes, of course, everything. Everything about him.”

Vairum is getting impatient. She launches more firmly toward her point.

“Well, my mother didn’t come when you and your sister fell sick with the fever, because she had visited recently, and I said we were fine here, we were managing. Then she would have come when your father took ill, she was preparing to come, but then he died and she fell sick herself. From the shock...”

She looks to see how Vairum is taking this. He doesn’t understand why she is talking about all this now.

“Even if she had come, you might not have remembered her. There were so many people around at that time, it was hard for both you children.” Sivakami shifts her position. Her knees crack. “When my mother fell ill, of course, I went to see her. Do you remember that? Murthy and Rukmini took care of you and Thangam. I meant to go for one week, but I stayed for three.”

Vairum shrugs—maybe he remembers, maybe not. Murthy and Rukmini’s house is like a second home. They always took their meals there when Sivakami was isolated with her period, for instance—who could remember whether they stayed for a few days or weeks?

“I stayed on then because she died, and, you know, there were things to be done. But before she passed on, there was something else. When I arrived, she already knew she was dying. She called me to her side, when no one else was around, especially your uncles or their wives, and she gave me an instruction. It was something I had to promise her, at her deathbed, as her only daughter.”