The Toss of a Lemon (4 page)

3. Her husband has just wandered off into the forest with a small band of itinerant ascetics,
siddhas,
naked but for their hair and some holy ash, or maybe dirt, smeared in patterns on their blue-black or mud-brown skin, stretched taut on bony bodies ...

The fiends had come to the front door. She had heard Hanumarathnam’s brisk step behind her and stepped back, gaping at their audacity, to allow him to chastise them. He passed through the door, said, “I’m going out,” and then she was watching him disappear. She had looked around, hoping, at least, that the neighbours hadn’t seen, but they all had. She had closed the door, something never done in daylight, too shocked to resume what the siddhas had interrupted: her afternoon cry.

She enjoys this cry, as she enjoys the parrots at sunset, and sex, and being mistress of her own home. She is only thirteen years old and misses her mother’s hands in her hair each morning, and the little puppy her brothers had found a few weeks before she left, and so she weeps a little each day. A little less each day, but still she weeps because she is on her own with her husband—even though he is handsome and gentle and is teaching her the ways of love.

Sometimes, during the day, she thinks about what happened the night before, in the dark of the closed house. He’s always giving her some instruction or another, which often makes her giggle. When she finally manages to do what he is telling her, however, he is usually correct about the result. (You may imagine him as a young scientist in his first laboratory—many theories and, finally, the opportunity to try them.) Last night’s was challenging, but she is slim and supple ...

Sivakami snaps herself from her reverie. He is gone! He has disappeared into the forest and here she sits idly beneath a window with a stupid smile on her face. She walks briskly to the well in the back, draws a bucket of water, cool even now in the hot season, and roughly washes her face. Stalking back into the main hall, she falls on her knees in front of the large black stone Ramar that dominates the room.

That morning, she ground fresh sandalwood pulp to anoint it, the figures of noble Rama, who stands in the centre, chest out, holding his signature bow; chaste Sita, to his left, her palms together, head modestly inclined; warriorlike Lakshmana, to his brother’s right; and faithful Hanuman, the monkey god and Rama’s deputy in the war on Lanka, who kneels before them. Every day Sivakami decorates them with sandalwood and vermilion, ornaments them with blossoms of marigold and jasmine and then proves the gods’ beauty by burnishing their features with chips of lighted camphor, held aloft. Her mother-in-law’s devotion to this statue had been legendary. She called her son after Hanuman, the monkey, Rama’s most ardent devotee, and appended it with “rathnam,” a common suffix for boys’ names in this region, in honour of the hill temple in whose shadow they live, the founding myth of which concerned a gem lost then found.

Hanumarathnam’s name is a constant reminder to Sivakami (whenever she hears it; she herself would never say her husband’s name) of the legacy she has inherited. The statue is the household embodied.

She prays, but on this dark afternoon when their home has been seemingly sundered by prehistoric wraith-men, she feels she must do more. She plucks flowers from her garden, weaves fragrant garlands, drapes them on her gods and falls again before them in supplication.

It’s still not enough. She needs not cold stone but warm eyes. The neighbours have all seen anyway. She goes out her back courtyard and next door, to see her husband’s aunt, Annam. Sitting on the step behind her kitchen, she pours out her heart.

Annam laughs, then stops at Sivakami’s expression and pats her knee. “He has always done that, ever since he was a small boy. They come and look for him, he spends a few days with them. He used to ask me to prepare a packet of food to give them when they returned. That will be your job now. No one knows what they do, what they tell. One very naughty boy, you know, Jagganathan, he tried to spy on Hanumarathnam once, some fifteen or twenty years back.”

“Mute Jagganathan, up the road?” Sivakami frowns.

Rukmini comes into the kitchen from their main hall, rubbing her eyes, her sari dishevelled as she wakes from her afternoon rest.

“The last time he spoke was to boast that he was going to find out the secrets of the siddhas, whatever they share with your husband. ‘Why not me?’ he said. ‘I’m as good as him.’ Stupid boy. We never found out what he saw. Swagger on his face, he opened his mouth to tell us what he had learned. No sound came out.”

“Can’t he write things on a slate?” Sivakami lets herself be drawn into the story.

“He has never written what he saw. Your husband was only a boy. He went and spoke to Jagganathan’s mother, tried giving cures, but nothing worked. I think he was not the one who did it. I suspect he could cure Jagganathan now, if he wanted. But maybe he thinks ...”

She pauses until Sivakami prompts her. “Thinks ... ?”

“Maybe he thinks it is better if Jagganathan has no chance to speak.”

Sivakami looks away, pouting, and wonders if she has betrayed him by coming here.

“Go home. Have your supper, lock the door, go to sleep. Hanumarathnam will wake you if he comes in the night. If he doesn’t, he will come soon.”

“Is he safe?” Sivakami asks finally, betraying a little anger that this was not her first concern.

“Was he safe all those times before you were his wife?” Annam snorts and gets up. “How many people have what he has? It is a gift and you are very lucky. I’ll send my servant’s daughter to sleep in your house tonight so you won’t be afraid.”

As soon as it is cool enough, Sivakami goes up on the roof to scan the countryside. Dusk finds her numbly watching the parrots as they take their low sunset swoops. Shortly after dark, the servant girl arrives and silently sleeps in the main hall as Sivakami lies awake. Nearly two days pass in long hours. The elderly servants come at their usual times, to sweep, bring vegetables and kerosene from the market, sort the rice for stones, shape cow dung into patties and slap them onto the courtyard walls to dry into fuel chips. They give no indication that they think anything is wrong, as Sivakami sits half willing them to notice her fuming in a corner of the main hall.

She is the cherished only daughter of a not unknown family. She was not raised to be left alone. She didn’t marry to be left alone. She reviews again the details of her marriage, which echo in her mind like her footfalls in the empty house.

When Hanumarathnam returns, Sivakami is haggard. Though thinner, he seems renewed, vigorous, faintly glowing even. He asks her if she has cooked. She has, as she has three times every day of his absence, anticipating his return.

“Pack four meals, my dear. Large meals,” he says, his eyes dancing with hidden thoughts, new knowledge, non-Brahmin fascinations of which she is no part.

He knows things he has no right to know.

But he is her husband and he has asked for food, so she packages rice with sambar and vegetables into plantain leaves and binds them neatly with long fibres pulled from palm leaf stems. The yogourt rice course she wraps separately with tidy daubs of pickles. She is numb. She is packing food for her husband’s abductors, his friends, his mentors, who are just the sort of people she has been taught are dirty—which anyone can verify by looking at them. By smelling them.

They are not only smelly, they are sarcastic. Sarcastic to the point of blasphemy: as they saunter along the Brahmin quarter in the direction of the Krishna temple, no doubt savouring the pollution their naked, non-Brahmin forms are bestowing on the sanctified land, they cry, “Here is a body, feed it!”

It is the cry that distinguishes mendicants from beggars. In the old days, before Brahmins secured land and, thus, income, when they were strictly priests and scholars, living in righteous poverty, they would gather their daily sustenance by walking the street, carrying nothing but a brass jug and a walking stick. Hearing their cry, “Here is a body, feed it!” villagers would run after them and press upon them paddy and lentils. Now this drama is being re-enacted before Sivakami’s own house, except that those offering are Brahmins and the criers are non-Brahmins and Sivakami’s husband, a Brahmin, is the non-Brahmins’ great friend.

So now that he’s back, she asks herself, Who is he, her husband? Is marriage not a known quantity, a thousand and one inconsequential variations on fixed roles and results?

Sivakami becomes pregnant the night her husband returns.

Which is to say that things go a little differently from usual. After it happens, her husband explains that this is the required conclusion if they are to create children, but that it has not happened before because the philosophy in which he is receiving instruction teaches that men must learn to conserve their life force, to keep it within them and not jet it from their bodies at the first hint of pleasure. This night, though, for him, it was not possible. Perhaps he was weak from three days without food, perhaps exhilarated by his learning, perhaps just a little too glad at holding her again. Sivakami was at first frightened by seeing his eyes roll, his body tense and spasm. She had thought for a moment that he was having a seizure—could this be one more thing about him she hadn’t been told? Following his explanation, she is relieved, and testifies also to her happiness at his return, though she is a little disappointed by the brevity of their fun.

Now that they are together again, in the pre-dawn, post-coital calm and commonality, she is emboldened to ask about these siddhas, suddenly so central to her marriage. Her husband replies, “They are men. Men concerned with perfection.”

“What perfection?” She tries not to scoff.

“Lower metals can be made into gold,” he says, and his tone makes her wonder for a moment if he means this literally. “Have you heard of that? The siddhas are teaching me how. And, by an analogous process, the body can attain spiritual freedom. Perfection, like gold, but while still in life, not after, you see?”

He is not really asking and so she just allows him to continue.

“But it is a very, very long process. These men, the siddhas, how old do you think they are?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t want to show too much interest.

“Guess.” He smiles.

She sits up, her arms wrapped around her knees. “I can’t see them very well, their hair snakes to their knees, they’re all dusty, and I didn’t look, sort of, directly.”

“Hm?”

“They wear no clothes, am I supposed to inspect them?” Hanumarathnam begins laughing and her irritation increases as she continues. “Go up and stare at these naked men up and down to determine the depth of wrinkles beneath their coat of mud and ash?” She stops and waits, sulking, until he answers his own question.

“They are some hundreds of years old.”

“Hah!”

Hanumarathnam looks a little taken aback at her vehemence, and she is both scared and glad.

“Truly I am saying,” he continues a bit cautiously, “they extend their lives. It takes so much time to transform the soul, and since the body is the soul’s vessel, its life, too, must be extended. And their practices increase vigour and so naturally extend the life. They must live long, else how to learn and practise sufficiently? How to find time?”

“Is that what you are doing?”

“I am not a siddha.” He stretches and yawns.

“I thought they hated Brahmins.”

“They do,” he says lightly. “They mock Brahmins.”

“Then how have they come to call on you?”

“Brahmins have knowledge too.”

“They want to learn ... what? Astrology? Healing arts?” This, at least, is something in which she can take satisfaction: they are interested in his scholarship.

“We sometimes debate.”

This is less welcome: a debate implies he treats them as his equals. “And you are learning their ... to ... extend your life? You are going to live for hundreds of years?”

“I said, I am not a siddha.”

“But you are doing their practice, philosophy, whatever you call it.” What, exactly, is his relationship with them?

Hanumarathnam sighs. “I am living here with you in the Brahmin quarter,” he says, his mouth a bit tight as he speaks in the minor-key singsong reserved for unnecessary explanations. “Once or twice in a year I go with them, then I come back to my nice house and I try some experiments. There are forces at work in my life which do not enter into theirs.”

“Is it true that they write obscene poetry?” Surely this, she thinks, should cap her case.

“It has other meanings also ...”

“Anti-Brahmin messages and so on.”

“Yes, yes. Anti-Brahmin messages. Is this what the neighbours have been telling you while I was away?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. “The poetry is satirical. It is critical of the idea of caste.”

“I should hope you debate this, at the least.”

“Yes ... but the poetry is more. It is also about spiritual life. Transformation. The perfection of base matter ...”

“Like base metals into gold.”

“Quite.” He pats her knee. “They have means.”

Sivakami maintains what she thinks is a look of resolute skepticism, though she feels a little reluctant excitement at the idea that her husband may be learning a means of prolonging his life.