The Toss of a Lemon (40 page)

Sivakami grimly squats and plunges the tongs amid the vadais to make them flip. Visalam squats beside her, patting vadai dough into sticky dumplings on a round, oil-blackened board, pressing her lips together and looking down, to keep herself from laughing.

“Will people go to see this, this... spectacle?” Sivakami demands. She lifts the crisped vadais from the vat and drops them into a vessel of yogourt, using her sari to wipe sweat from her upper lip and the corners of her eyes. Visalam slides a half-dozen more raw vadais into the pan, where they sink, begin to emit streams of bubbles and rise. Visalam starts to giggle, and when Sivakami asks, “What?” points to the pan.

“Please, Sivakamikka,” Gayatri says from the main hall, blowing on her coffee. “Don’t be discouraged.”

“Who is discouraged by these dirty, low types? Will Rama and Sita pay attention to these Brahmin-haters?” She stops herself from saying aloud the rest of her thoughts.
Would my husband have gone to the “other” Ramayana? He used to go with them, the ones who said there is no caste.
Did they say
“Long
live
Ravana”? What appeal
is there in
a topsy-turvy
world?

“I’m sure I don’t know, Amma,” Muchami solemnly replies, and Sivakami realizes she may have spoken her last question aloud, though sometimes, with Muchami, it doesn’t seem she has to.

Visalam has patted out two more batches of vadais.

“Go,” Sivakami tells her. “The kitchen is too hot.”

The girl springs out to the courtyard and douses herself with well water, guffawing with delight.

The performance troupe Sivakami invited is setting up a stage in a mango grove about two hundred paces east along the cart track that leads from the southern exit of the Brahmin quarter. A number of children lucky or devious enough to have escaped work or school are goggling at the performers, who, even without makeup or costume, display a high theatricality of bearing. Several tease the children and make them shriek with gorgeous terror.

A mile directly east of Sivakami’s back door, beyond the canal and the tracks, another stage and canopy are being erected, by performers physically indistinguishable from the first group in any significant way, though Sivakami’s supporters will claim they are crude in looks and comportment. Even if they hadn’t been so congenitally, the supporters splutter, they would have become so as a result of their crude tampering. How dare they touch the untouchable, alter the unalterable ? The Ramayana is a foundation stone, a touchstone, a hero stone inscribed with the glorious events of some bygone day so they may never be erased nor forgotten, nor changed.

It’s probably coincidence that the interloping troupe has come to play in the same week as Sivakami’s scheduled performance, but both sides claim it’s deliberate. The performers Sivakami hired are silent in the face of all political questions, while the other troupe and its citified supporters proclaim their mandate loud and proud:

“While Rama is seen by the ignorant Brahmin-followers to be a valiant hero, we will show him to be a cowardly schemer!

“While the ignorant Brahmins and the uneducated masses they have duped see Ravana as a licentious demon, we will show him to be an honourable man, taking no more—and no less—revenge than he must to vouchsafe his reputation!

“While the ignorant and the duped exhort their young virgins to uphold Sita as the model of virtuous womanhood, taking no initiative, living by the word of her husband, as instructed in that vile manual, The Laws According to
Manu,
this drama will expose her as the wanton and lusty strumpet she really was!”

The most skilled of the criers explain and extemporize; the least skilled recite, halting but loud, from block-printed, hand-sewn booklets. They thrust their manifesto into the hands of numberless unlettered villagers, cajoling, mocking, seducing them into attending. They roam and comb every caste neighbourhood, except the Brahmins’, where they dump piles of the pamphlets at each exit.

In the hands of any other caste member, the pamphlets look like invitations. Littering the Brahmin quarter, they look like warnings. The wind blows them through the street, plastering them against the red and white stripes of the verandas. Some blow up beyond the reach of indignant reactionaries gathering them to thrust in their fires; some blow into eavestroughs and the little space between roof and walls. Perhaps they will be forgotten there for seasons on end and then discovered by an inquisitive grandchild in a time when all such conflicts are obsolete.

“Come one, come all!” the pamphleteer politicos scream.

“Invaders out! Down with Brahmin raj! The day of the elite has ended! They don’t respect us—we have Self-Respect! Long live the real Tamil people!”

Tonight, the seven-night-long performances commence. Which will draw the larger crowd?

Vairum overhears men taking bets at the Kulithalai Club, when he goes to play tennis. Manifold factors weight the odds. As with
bhajans
or big temple events, only a small proportion of audience members attend Ramayana recitals or dramatizations out of religious devotion. Most come for entertainment, but devotion and diversion usually need not be separated. Tonight, the townsfolk face a strange choice: should they or should they not go to the new Ramayana, which, as a novelty, is a much surer source of entertainment than the smooth and well-worn passages and postures of the classical presentation? Will it be blasphemous? Worse, disrespectful?

And there are other concerns: Will there be violence? Riots? What does this performance signify?

The members of Minister’s political salon have, as always, an irreconcilable variety of opinions on the matter.

“It’s an insult and an affront,” foams Dr. Kittu Iyer, “and quite wholly unnecessary and—”

“False.” Mani Iyer interrupts, agreeing emphatically with the older Brahmin man. “It’s all lies.”

Vairum, since returning to Cholapatti, has been a regular attendee at the salon, though he doesn’t come daily, because he is too busy with his work and because he prefers to maintain a slight distance from these men who are nonetheless useful to him.

“It is the expression of our youth.” Muthu Reddiar sweeps the space before him good-humouredly. “They are impatient. Don’t take it so seriously.”

Vairum had chatted with Minister on arriving, before the others had come. This “Self-Respect” Ramayana seems to Minister to be the harbinger of a fate that has already begun to strike. The years have not been great for him, politically, and he is serving as Taluk Board president—again. He had stood for election last year at the urging of his numerous friends. While it was not in him to turn down any opportunity to be a figurehead, he was acutely conscious of not having held so lowly a position (the first time, it was a pinnacle!) in over ten years. Back then it was a position given by appointment. In the years since, these decisions have increasingly been made by election. Minister progressed into ever-greater circles of influence, elected to the District Board and then to the Legislative Council, but as the franchise expanded beyond the elite, his decline was drawn: he can no longer drum up a majority vote beyond the taluk. Now, Brahmins will vote for him because he is one of them, and select non-Brahmins if he can still do something for them. But he never thought to court peasants—it never occurred to him that they could have any impact on his political future.

While the Self-Respecters’ politics take something from each of Congress (they are for independence) and Justice (they advocate rule by non-Brahmins), they are resolved on overturning the elite class to which all the salon-goers belong, regardless of caste. These men enjoy debating Self-Respect politics, and even take the Dravidians’ side in the safety of their small gathering, but they are scared of the Self-Respecters and have no intention of going near that performance tonight.

Dr. Kittu Iyer’s eye softens as it lands on Vairum, who rarely speaks here, despite his frequent attendance. “You, at least, we can count on to take the right side in this debate: it’s wonderful of your mother to be doing this for you, and the whole community will benefit, especially the illiterates, who get so few such uplifting opportunities.”

Unsurprisingly, the conventional audience gets by far the greater share that first night. Vairum attends, as he is expected to, with Vani, and feels acutely self-conscious. He thinks at first that this is because those in the audience fawningly make a place for him at the front, expressing gratitude that his mother has done this for them. Perhaps he is uncomfortable because they all know the reason Sivakami has sponsored this: his and Vani’s childlessness. He realizes, however, over the course of the performance, which he finds predictably conventional and uninspiring, that, although he is religious, he has nothing in common with the Brahmins who surround him.

He unconsciously fingers the old silver coin flipped into his waistband as he thinks how he has no friends among the Brahmins here. Since returning, he has made friends mostly among upper-caste non-Brahmins in Kulithalai while his Cholapatti neighbours remain as distasteful to him as ever, in their narrowness and lack of generosity, which he thinks he sees in his mother, also: she will help anyone of the clan, but her goodwill, he thinks, stops at the exit to the Brahmin quarter. He has also heard them complaining about his generosity,
of all
things, he thinks, getting worked up even as he sits before the decorated stage, his mind far from the action. He has bought a number of their plots of land, which they had let go through their laziness and bad decisions, and turned them around. They got a better price from him than they would from anyone else, but then they complain to one another! Jealousy. And they can’t stand that he is friends with non-Brahmins, and that he hired a non-Brahmin manager for his rice mill: the best applicant, a born leader, even if he is from one of the peasant castes.

Why should I pretend solidarity with
my caste? he is fuming, as they sit around him, smelling of holy ash and hair oil, gasping at all the familiar plot points.
What
have they ever
done for
me?

He waits out the performance, more for Vani’s sake than anything, but it is a torment.

THE NEXT MORNING, when Muthu Reddiar arrives at the salon entrance, mopping his brow with an outsized kerchief and twirling the ends of his moustaches to guard against wilting, he wheezes, “Bets are being paid out at the club.”

“The people have shown their might!” an unfamiliar voice crows in Tamil behind him. It’s Murthy, his hair oiled and slicked back with care into a kudumi, minus one lock hanging before his ear. His kurta is stained with what might be squash. He occasionally drops in at the salon to tout Brahmin uplift: communal politics have led Brahmins, too, to realize they might claim some unified identity. “Tradition offers reassurance, consolation,” Murthy puffs. “It will always win out over sensationalism. Clearly, the people’s affection for the real Ramayana will triumph over childish stunts.”

Minister always welcomes Murthy (despite the man’s disregard for the English usage rule) as a link to a constituency best cultivated via its zealots. Still, he hates having to think in communal terms and yearns for the times when he had only to fulfill promises to important individuals.

“Bah! The people are scared.” Ranga Chettiar jabs his finger aggressively at Murthy, who looks surprised and pained. “You and your ilk have cowed them for eight thousand years. But someday”—the Chettiar’s voice dives deep into his most profundo basso—“someday, he will break the chains of Aryan domination and come into the full flowering of his Dravidian manhood...”

“So breaking the chains of British domination and coming into our Indian manhood takes no place in your scheme?” Dr. Kittu Iyer’s narrow jowls quiver.

“Now, now.” Minister’s tone is more censorious than he would wish, but the doctor has hit a nerve. “If one is born and comes of age within a united empire, loyalty to it is as loyalty to parents and ancestors. If one renounces one’s heritage, one is nothing.”