The Toss of a Lemon (43 page)

Cheering.

“But someone must guide and order the proceedings, at least, and for this task I propose our Mariamman, never bent nor bowed.” He kicks off his slippers and makes an elaborate prostration to the tribal goddess. All those present do the same, though the salon members must be rolled into and lifted out of the position, unable to help themselves with their hands.

Ravana settles himself on a bamboo mat. Two curvaceous young women fan him. “I declare the proceedings open,” he announces lightly.

This is the night Sivakami is to attend the Ramayana she sponsored. Muchami has minimized the degree of attrition it has suffered, so she is shocked, when she approaches the pandal, to find no more than twenty people in attendance, made up of a few neighbours, with some Kulithalai Brahmins she doesn’t know, even though the coronation of Rama has already begun. She has brought Vani, and had called for Murthy and Rukmini before leaving. Rukmini came but said it seemed her husband was already at the performance. Gayatri, sitting on her veranda with her children as they passed, said the same thing.

Now Sivakami turns to Muchami, who is following with Mari at a respectful distance. “Muchami! Where are Murthy Anna and Minister Anna?” she whispers loudly.

Muchami, miserable and mortified on her behalf, looks around. “I can’t imagine, Amma.”

Sivakami takes a place on a mat to one side of the stage and says to Vani, “I suppose Vairum was meeting some associate and will come when he’s done?”

Vani doesn’t answer. Sivakami looks at her hard and looks for Muchami again, but he has taken a place with the non-Brahmins, too far away to ask him the same question.

Back at the Self-Respect Ramayana, each of the characters is tried, one by one. Vairum, caught up in the mood of the crowd, finds the hearings eerily convincing. It never would have occurred to him to fault Rama and Sita for behaving as they do in the story, but it’s really quite arguable. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to see his gods as he did before. Perhaps this is what it means to be a Hindu in the new age. Mother and father are to be worshipped as gods, and they have their limitations, as Vairum increasingly can see. Why shouldn’t the gods, too, admit their faults?

Next, the politicians are tried: the chubby Gandhi, the buck-toothed Nehru, a host of others, found short-sighted—nay, blind; neglectful; unwilling to face their own prejudices. The crowd is in a frenzy.

Finally, the men of the salon: Brahmin and non-Brahmin but all clearly elite, marked unmistakably by their fine clothes, soft hands, softer bellies. They are given no chance to speak because they are clearly guilty, guilty, guilty.

Vairum recalls his euphoria at that long-ago courtroom victory when he won his sister her due. Here it is again, the triumph of right over might. The excitement of the crowd, unbelievably, is still mounting. Their clamour coalesces into a chant: “Parade! Parade!”

Like a snake with a belly full of squirming mice, the throng surges out along the path where, so recently, Murthy stretched his now defiled body, and heads toward the other tent.

“There’s another Brahmin!” shouts one of the hired goons. “Take him!”

Vairum is alarmed as two of the bailiffs reach for him.

“Ugh!” The one to reach him first pulls back. “Stop! Leper!”

The thugs surround Vairum but none is willing to touch him. One throws him a rope. “Tie your own wrists, leper.”

“No!” Two of Muchami’s nephews push through the crowd and shove them aside, defending Vairum against attack as they had when they were all lads in school. “He doesn’t count. He has attended every night of your Ramayana.”

“It’s lascivious curiosity, just as they like our women,” sneers the roughest-looking bailiff.

“Yeah, take advantage, but don’t take it home,” says another.

“Really, he is different. Even the Brahmins know it,” says the older nephew gently. By then, several of Vairum’s friends, who were willing to defend him but, unlike the nephews, unused to having to, have advanced with similar protests.

The mass has continued to flow around them, and now Ravana comes past on his horse, with the prisoners of the salon, roped together, trudging abjectly behind.

“What’s this, a stray?” Ravana trumpets from far above, then squints at him. “Leper?”

“They say he’s an exception, sire,” the tubby bailiff explains.

“Oh, they say so, do they?” Ravana glances from one nephew to another. “Well then, it must be so. We must trust the locals, fellows, or how will they ever trust us? Hop to, my nasties,” he calls to the salon cortege. “There’s more than one way to conquer,” he nods to the foiled vigilantes. “In making war, as in making love, you must use your head as well as your hands.”

He gallops on with a laugh and wink.

VAIRUM IS SWEPT ALONG in the crowd to “The Coronation of Rama,” the grand finale of the conventional Ramayana.

Thus it is that Sivakami witnesses her gods arrested and tried, in a monkey court where the only monkey is found innocent, and the enemy of her gods, whose painted demon face revealed little intelligence and much vanity, is surprised but gratified to find himself revered as a hero. She sees her gods and her neighbours pelted with shoes (no one should have been wearing shoes on ground that had been consecrated for the performance, she thinks—did they bring them in bags?) and thus turned into untouchables. Rama is defiled, hit with the very sandals—his own—that his younger brother had placed on the throne when the god was sent into exile.

From her vantage point, backed safely by Muchami and Mari into a corner of the clearing, along with Vani and Rukmini, Sivakami feels curiously unsurprised to see Vairum arrive with the crowd from the other Ramayana, more surprised to see Murthy and Minister arrive as prisoners.

She had been wondering whether all this was her fault, whether she attracted the other Ramayana with her extravagant gesture. Gayatri and Muchami had assured her, no, no, this could never be the case. It’s not the kind of thing she would say to Vairum. She and he make eye contact now, across the crowd, but she can’t tell what he is thinking. From her protected corner, she tries but can’t tell if he is wearing shoes, as has been his habit since Minister bought him his first pair.

Hours later, the hoopla shows no sign of abating, and in fact feels as though it might turn ugly. Muchami edges Sivakami, Rukmini, Vani and Mari along the clearing to the path and signals to Vairum to join them. Vairum says a word of farewell to a couple of friends and comes to them. He is barefooted, but as they make their way along the path, he dives for a moment into the brush and recovers his shoes.

They are all silent as they walk and Sivakami soon realizes she is the only one who can break the quiet. None of the others will speak before she or Vairum does, and Vairum never feels the need to account for his actions.

“If you didn’t want the Ramayana, I never would have commissioned it,” she says, not trying to keep the reproach out of her voice.

“I never said I didn’t want it,” he replies, aware that this doesn’t begin to explain his behaviour.

“How could you humiliate me so?” she whispers.

“I had no intention to humiliate you. My convictions are different from yours, that is all.”

It’s true that he attended the other Ramayana because he couldn’t stand to attend Sivakami’s, and yet, even as he says he didn’t mean to humiliate her, he feels the statement turning into a lie. Could he have borne his neighbours’ company for her sake? Another son might have, but what other son is subjected to all he must endure, for the sake of caste?

“I can’t stand to be a Brahmin sometimes. If you weren’t a Brahmin, you wouldn’t be in white, with your head shaved, hiding in the house, living constantly in a state of victimhood while thinking yourself better than everyone else.”

“We are better,” Sivakami says simply, bewildered. “Why are you not proud?”

“I just can’t stand it!” he roars at her, turning backward along the path to face her, and the others, arrayed behind. “That there is no escape. Can’t you... I want to see things differently sometimes!”

He stalks ahead, and they follow him home.

The next morning, he feels moody and stays in the house. As the older children leave for school, he puts a mat to one side of the main hall, where he can listen to Vani play. He lies, his elbow on a bolster, letting the music ebb around him as though he is lying in a few inches of warm ocean at the beach.

One little grandchild is creeping around the house still: Sita. She comes in from the garden but stops when she sees him, and backs away again. Unpleasant-looking child, he thinks, and then is overcome by throbbing, choking, desirous sadness. He turns back to watch his wife. Why haven’t we had
a
child, my love?

I killed my father, he killed his father. He doesn’t remember when he first heard the chorus in his brain, sounding as though it has murmured there since he was born. Vani, without ceasing her music, looks at him suddenly, and he, feeling her glance, looks back. Even to him she speaks little, but she can still, as she did from that first day, drown out the deathly chatter with her music and her eyes.

To escape his origins; to embrace them.

MUCHAMI HAS CARED FOR ALL of Thangam’s children with as much tenderness as their personalities and his station permitted, but he has never grown so attached to one as he has to Janaki in the months since she arrived. He tried with all of the children to distract them from their grief at losing their mother, tried to compensate with games and amusement for the affection Sivakami was unable to give them during the day. Only with Janaki, though, has he formed such a bond. She shines with a brighter light than her siblings, he often thinks, as she trots along beside him, helping with his chores and chattering.

Janaki considers the calves to be her special responsibility and helps especially by coaching the calves in comportment, telling them to stop licking the wall, for instance, where their craving for lime has worn a smudgy brick border into the whitewash. Muchami does the tending and milking. It’s a very particular procedure. A calf is unroped and led to his mother. He roughly butts and nudges her udders before he clamps on. After a few moments, he’s pulled off her belly and tied so that she can reach him but he can no longer reach the udders, and then she is milked while she licks her calf’s back and shoulders. The very young calves stay close by their mothers even after they are untied. They’re allowed more milk. But a slightly older calf, once untied, will dash straight to the water trough. The mother cow will look on for a few moments, then turn her face toward her feed. This calf is not really hers to mother, anyhow. He was born on someone else’s account.

When the milk is handed to Sivakami, that is Janaki’s cue to rouse her sleepy-faced siblings. She gleefully taps heads and shakes shoulders, saying officiously, “Hoi! Hoi, lazybones, what do you think this is, a hospital?” She has heard hospitals are places with cots where everyone stays in bed all day. “Get up!”

Each child sips a cup of boiled milk flavoured with sugar and the scents of cow and woodsmoke. Chores and baths follow and last urgent sums of homework. Janaki usually gets a piece of chalk and makes marks on the floor as her siblings do on their slates, her markings as incomprehensible to them as theirs are to her.

More important than any of these activities, though, is listening to Vani play. After Laddu and Sita have departed for school, Janaki creeps close to listen to her aunt. She’s not sure if Vani sees her; sometimes Vani smiles, but it’s a mysterious smile and could as easily be a response to a moment in the music or some fleeting sensation as to Janaki. From all around, from street and kitchen come the sounds of people working, talking, solving problems and creating new ones, but Vani responds to none of it. She is not startled by loud noises, not disturbed by shouting.