The Toss of a Lemon (47 page)

Sita is too sleepy and grumpy to be properly cruel and so only asks, “Where’s your uniform, twerp?”

Janaki looks up from her slate as though irritated at the interruption and asks defiantly, “What do I need it for?”

“To go to school?” Sita yawns loudly.

“I went yesterday.” Janaki bends again to her slate.

Even Sita is given pause by this, though she recovers quickly. “What, you think you’re finished?”

“Yep. I’m needed here,” Janaki confides with a return of her old assurance. She understands now that she can’t be both at school and at home. People need to make choices in life; this is hers.

“Amma!” Sita bellows, and Sivakami comes running. “Amma, Janaki thinks she’s not going to school any more.”

“Janaki-baby, shouldn’t you put on your uniform?” Sivakami asks kindly, and all Janaki’s confidence deserts her.

She sits like a crumpled paper cut-out of herself. Sivakami doesn’t say more. She tells the children to come to breakfast. Janaki doesn’t come. The bullock cart arrives. Janaki stays in her hall-door niche. Vani invites her to beat the taalam on the final number. Janaki does— Vairum left on business early that morning, and she doesn’t need to worry about him.

Today Vani’s story changes: now the uncle is the one on the brink of misfortune and trying to keep it secret from the rest of the family, and the family guesses, from the reliquary’s appearance, that someone is hiding something, though not what or who.

And now Muchami is ready to depart and Janaki to depart with him.

On the road, she starts in with the day’s questions.

“Muchami, how come rice and lentils get soft when they’re cooked, but idlis and dosai get hard?” she asks in a let’-forget-the-past tone.

Muchami smiles at her sadly. “I don’t know, Janaki-baby. Maybe you should ask your teacher that one.”

Janaki slides him a wary look. “What teacher, Muchami?”

“Your teacher at school.” He looks at her and back at the road.

“I’m finished school, Muchami,” she explains. “It was spreading me too thin.”

“But you have so many questions, Janaki, that you and I can’t answer alone. We need your teacher.”

Janaki is silent, wondering how Muchami could be so wrong in his judgment.

“Janaki-baby.” Muchami clears his throat. “Did you learn Sanskrit in school?”

“No,” replies Janaki, and it’s the truth. She didn’t learn it, she discovered she already knew it. “You can’t learn Sanskrit at school, Muchami, that’s why Laddu Anna needs to learn it at home.”

“Laddu is being taught at home because he’s not learning in school, but he’s not learning at home, either,” Muchami points out, and a little of Janaki’s faith in him is restored. “But you could learn so much, Janaki-baby. Trust me: so much that you can’t learn at home, that I can’t learn unless you go and do it for me. Then you can teach me. Please go back to school, Janaki-baby. Do it for me.”

Janaki is starting to see his point of view in spite of herself. Her practical mind begins rearranging her days. She could look after the cows before and after school. She and Muchami, too, can convene at other times to do what they must do. And she only need attend school a half day on Saturday, and Sunday not at all.

But what about Vani? Vani cannot be rearranged. Well—if Janaki is to be Muchami’s eyes and ears at school, he can be hers at home. Janaki will spend as much time as ever she is able listening to Vani’s music; he cannot help her with that. But he can listen to and relate the day’s stories. If he promises this, she will go back to school.

He can offer this. “Done.”

Done.

Janaki returns to school the next day, opening some doors, closing others. Muchami and she save their questions for the end of the day and weekends, but there are more and more questions never asked and never answered, and eventually, more and more she doesn’t think to seek answers for.

THERE IS A BOY ON SIVAKAMI’S STEP holding out a piece of paper. She doesn’t understand.

He explains that it is a telegram.

The telegram. Sivakami receives it with trembling hands. Vairum always has to be modern. He and Vani had travelled to her parents’ house for Vani’s delivery. If the telegram is arriving in Cholapatti today, that means he sent it... when? How long do they take?

These thoughts chase one another like minnows through the reeds of her mind. She has never been so nervous. She takes a short breath through her nose and opens the seal.

A son of her son, a son of her son. She falls on her knees in front of the Ramar. Thank you, thank you. Her elation is so great it feels not unlike despair: how can this be? She wished for this so long and so hard that she had nearly given it up. Her happiness now is too near wonder—how can this finally have come to pass?—to be recognizable as joy.

Gradually, however, rocking back and forth on her knees before her gods, the telegram stretched between her hands like a cradle, she comes to accept and a grin starts to pull at her upper lip.

VAIRUM IS ON THE TRAIN HOME, wearing the same grin—that seen on a stranger walking the opposite way, that inward smile that makes one think, oh, someone has found love, has found a job, has been paid a high or casual compliment; someone has been made happy.

In the train car, people make conversation with him, and though he’s always the silent one in the compartment, this time he shyly confesses : he’s a father. He has a son.

I have a
son,
I have a
son. Cradled in the train in the drowsing of the day, Vairum’s thoughts drift to his own father, and those moments when he would have first learned he was father to a son. His musing is interrupted by a strong, sudden headache. The left half of his brain seems to throb, and the temple around it, one of the body’s irrational moments, the kind of pain that happens every so often for no reason. His left eyelid twitches. He shakes his head and holds his eye shut with his fingers until it is still. The train pauses at an uncovered village platform and he goes out to take a drink of water at the pump. When he sits down again, he can’t remember what he was thinking of and can’t be bothered remembering. He blissfully goes on conjuring his son and this mantle of fatherhood, drifting through such lulling, abstract thoughts as only Vani has ever before invoked in him.

He enters the main hall, falls at the feet of his gods, and then does the same for his mother, who holds her hands over him in blessing. He stands and looks into her eyes, the only person, with Vani, whose joy equals his.

He does not go out in the fields that day, which should have been his greatest priority after three days away. No, Vairum takes a few magazines and sits on the veranda. It is the strangest sight. Why is it so strange when it is precisely how most other men on the Brahmin quarter spend their days? Well, precisely for that reason. Several neighbours offer shy congratulations as they pass. Vairum modestly accepts. Murthy joins Vairum on the veranda and acts the proud senior uncle.

Sivakami lies awake that night, a night twelve long years in coming. Her optimism had ebbed a little with each succeeding—or should that be failing?—year, though she wouldn’t admit it, even to herself. It wears a person down, hope. So many pledges and pujas, from the most public and dramatic to the last one at home—the one that worked.

Had the miraculous not occurred, the events of that day might not have stayed in Sivakami’s mind at all, but as it is, she recalls the disagreement between Vani and Vairum over the puja. She had never seen them disagree and hasn’t since. Sivakami recalls that her own first child was conceived on a night when she and her husband were together again after a rupture, one of his unforgivable sojourns, and though it is awful to think that the best unions may be born of discord, she thinks more than one couple may share this experience. Certainly, Gayatri has gone so far as to confess she occasionally provokes fights with her husband because he works so ardently to regain her favour.

But Sivakami doesn’t think Vani was simply upset at having her playing interrupted, or at Vairum’s not trusting her to finish in time. South Indian classical music tends to be devotional. Vani was making a supplication that day, Sivakami believes, the same request they would then make in the puja, the same they had been making all those years. Vani had to stop Vairum from interrupting it.

For the last nine months, Vairum has been buoyant and benevolent as never before: kind to Thangam’s children, solicitous of his wife and mother. Sivakami and he have been united in their desire to care for Vani. Previously, Vani’s energies had mirrored the moon’s: she would be sluggish and sleepy while the moon was in shadow and shake with overabundant energy when it waxed bright. Pregnant, she was consistently inward-directed and content. Her playing became softer and more conventional—most often, she played paeans to Lord Krishna, favourite to children, songs she occasionally sang. She obediently drank the garlic rasam Sivakami prepared, even when she occasionally brought it back up. She had attacks of nausea through her first trimester that left her skin waxy and eyes dull. But she was obviously happy. She put on weight; her plummy figure and moon-like face grew rounder. She had always glowed, but in pregnancy, she looked less exceptional than she had before. Sivakami thinks this must be some portion of her happiness, as of Vairum’s: finally, they were like any couple. No longer the darkly repulsive business genius; no longer the eerily glowing musical genius. Just a young married couple expecting their first child.

Sivakami turns over to her other side. A son of her son, a son of her son ... she falls into a long sleep, deep and dark as a stone well.

Though perhaps her sleep should rather be compared to the bed of the Vaigai River, which runs behind Vani’s hometown: peaceful and solid in appearance, but with a current ever springing just beneath the surface, so that one need only rake the sand with one’s fingers to find one’s handprint immediately drowned.

While Vairum is striding about the fields the next day, shielded within the touching invincibility of parenthood, another telegram arrives.

While Vairum is out seeing that the earth will provide for his son, while he is gracefully accepting congratulations on this most natural and, for the father, effortless of achievements, while he stands gazing at the fertile fields and thinking how he never felt the goodness of sunshine before, Vairum’s gold medal, his rose-tinted spectacles, his soft beating heart, loses grip on this world and slips away.

Sivakami collapses. There is no other response. She crumples in a little bald and white heap on the brick floor and her granddaughters run to her, shrieking, not sure whether to touch her. They run around her screaming until she opens her eyes and finds some neighbours entering the front door and kneeling beside her. They look at the telegram and bring her a tumbler of water.

Like a pattern of sound waves radiating from a signal source, silence spreads over the Brahmin quarter, the village, the river and fields, until Vairum, some three miles away, notices a hush, shivers and starts running for home. He runs without stopping, the panicked Muchami struggling to keep up with him, and when he enters his house from the back and sees his mother on the floor of the hall and his nieces around her with tear-streaked faces and the neighbours all fearful and resigned, because babies are fragile and do tend to die, Vairum raises his face to his fate and feels it press him down to his knees. As he falls, though, he curses. He cannot change his fate, but he can object, and this he does, in tortured tones. Those who hear him talk of it for years: his scream, like no sound they had ever heard from any living being.

THANGAM HAS BEEN EXPECTED in Cholapatti for nearly a week now, and Janaki, for one, is tired of waiting.

“Is she coming today?” she asks Sivakami, as she has every morning since they were told to prepare for the visit and the arrival of a new baby. Their elder sister, Saradha, arrived a week ago, for the same reason—she is due in a couple of months—but she is bossy and Janaki, who has never lived with her, finds her a little hard to take. She longs to see her mother again.

Sivakami tells her wearily, as every morning, that she can’t say for sure.

“Why can’t you say for sure, Amma?” Janaki whines, while her siblings scramble to organize their school work. She always has hers ready the night before. She’s eight now and can barely remember living with her parents but still aches for her mother at times.

“Because your father is a ne‘er-do-well and a cad,” Vairum remarks casually as he passes her and breaks a couple of bananas off the stalk leaning in the pantry.

Janaki shrinks back against the main hall wall to let him pass back out. She watches him leave through the front door.