“What does that mean, Amma?” she asks Sivakami, her lower lip trembling.
“Nothing, kanna, nothing,” Sivakami clucks. Janaki keeps her head down, her hands folded in front of her. “Your father’s work keeps him very busy. He can’t easily get away when he wants.”
Muchami overhears this exchange from the courtyard but is not close enough to participate. He watches Janaki turn away,
oh,
my girl, too old now for him to take in his arms. As badly as she clearly needs to be held, there is no one now for that.
It’s lunchtime at school, and Janaki and her friend and benchmate Bharati go to pick up their tiffin boxes. “So has your amma come yet?”
Janaki momentarily can’t think of what her friend means. “Amma?” Then she realizes: Bharati is referring to Thangam. She’s not Brahmin and so has never been inside their home. She can’t know they call their grandmother Amma and refer to their mother as Akka. When Janaki was telling her friends that her mother was expected, she used the term “amma,” but as identification, not appellation. “Um, no. Probably today.”
“I thought she was coming a couple of days ago.”
“My appa’s work means he can’t always bring her whenever he wants,” Janaki parrots, glad that Bharati’s gone on ahead of her out of the classroom and doesn’t appear to have heard.
They look to see where their little gang of friends are sitting in the schoolyard and head for a slightly different place to force the other girls to come and join them.
“I couldn’t live without my mother,” says Bharati.
Is she being sly? Tough to say: her eyes are downcast, toward her lunch, which Janaki notices contains chicken. Although Janaki still only vaguely understands caste distinctions, she has been inculcated with Brahmin disapproval of non-vegetarianism. Even if one’s caste permits such practices, she believes better individuals behave as much like Brahmins as possible. Muchami and Mari would never touch meat.
“I don’t really notice it,” Janaki lies.
Bharati lives with her mother, but, like Janaki, in her mother’s mother’s house. This is unusual, and they have talked a little about this strange fact of their lives they have in common against the world. She has heard it whispered, however, that Bharati might not know who her father is. Janaki doesn’t know how this works but figures the subject must be sensitive. Janaki doesn’t live with her father either, but at least she’s confident of his identity.
“Ayoh!” yells Bharati all at once. Only the newest girl of their set jumps, the others being more accustomed to her melodrama.
“What?” asks one of them finally.
“We have our music lessons with that horrible Nandu Vadyar today,” Bharati groans. Janaki can’t help noticing that even Bharati’s complaints sound musical and appealing. “Everything I learn about music I learn only from Vani Amma. Nandu Vadyar may as well be teaching us to wash dishes. Janaki, when Vani Amma was playing ‘Nannu palimpa’ last night, oh I thought I would cry.” Bharati leaps up and falls to her knees. Arms arching skyward, eyes softened, she holds the pose as though she is being painted. She’s so pretty, with fair skin and straight jet hair, that all the girls easily imagine her as an illustration in a storybook about the gods. “It was as though I could really see her, pleading with Lord Rama ...” She clasps her hands at her breast and bows her head, while somehow still ensuring that her face is visible.
“Do you think when Nandu Vadyar hears music he’s hearing the same thing we are?” Janaki asks metaphysically.
“I don’t care what he hears.” Bharati resumes her lunch. “Anyway, that’s why I must have courage to listen to Vani Amma even after the sun goes down and the ghosts come out!”
Their four little friends jump and shiver as if on command. Janaki, because she is lieutenant and foil, and because she’s smarting from having had her question dismissed, remains icily still.
“I saw a ghost, Janaki, two days ago,” Bharati gasps, her eyes dancing, “when I came to hear Vani Amma play and Draupadi was late coming to get me. Can you guess where?”
“Tamarind tree, again?” Janaki assumes a diagnostic expression. “By the gate?”
“Have you seen the ghost that lives there?”
“Oh, there’s more than one,” Janaki world-wearily informs her. “Describe it.”
“Huge, skin of fire, dripping fangs, broken horns,” Bharati lists as though cataloguing the merits of a recent clothing purchase. All four of their friends are squirming, stricken.
“No, I haven’t seen that one,” Janaki admits with a tone of detached interest. “I think it almost got my brother once.”
“I shielded my eyes and ran.” Bharati mimes the tableau. “I could hear it chasing me until its power sucked it back into the tree.”
“But how can you bear to go back, Bharati?” One of their companions asks, reason and curiosity overtaking her fright.
“Because that’s the only place I can hear Vani Amma play,” Bharati harrumphs, adding dreamily, “I would overcome any fear, I would scale mountains and swim up waterfalls to live in her music.”
The whole rest of their class, munching lunches, looks frumpy and discontent in contrast with Bharati. Even Janaki, despite their close association, can never come close to matching her friend in style or mystery. Bharati seems to have been born sophisticated; there is something tragic that twinkles about her, something real or tinsel, one cannot tell, but it is intriguing either way.
On the bullock cart ride home, Janaki thinks on what may await her. She hopes her mother has arrived. She hopes her little sisters look like her, especially the one, Kamalam, who is coming to stay.
Vani normally commences playing shortly after the children get home. Today, though, as the bullock cart rounds off the town road onto the Brahmin-quarter approach, Janaki can already hear the music—vibrant, furious. Vani must be well into her session to have the raga at such a pitch.
The front hall, as always, is dim and cool, but the floor is shimmering with trails and patches of golden dust, as though a character from fairy stories has wandered through their home and enchanted it. The hair on Janaki’s neck stands up: her mother, loveliness itself, is seated against a pillar, smiling faintly. The contours of Thangam’s shoulders are accentuated by shadows of fairy dust, the pleats of her sari spread against her swollen belly. Kamalam, a little girl who does look like Janaki, leans against Thangam shyly. Another, littler girl, Radhai, is galloping to and fro in the garden with Muchami, banging trees with a stick.
Laddu, Sita and Janaki all grin and shuffle their feet in front of their mother.
“His.”
“His.”
“Hi,” they say.
“Kiss your mother,” Sivakami says loudly from the kitchen doorway, and the children go to Thangam, bending awkwardly to peck her on the cheek. She touches them lightly with her hand as they incline toward her. She smiles as if to put them off, and Sivakami, watching, feels pained. Has Thangam been made unable to show affection, too embarrassed by her father’s favouritism, and now by her fecundity? But why make the children
suffer for
that? thinks Sivakami. Vairum is not even home.
The children look at Sivakami as if to ask what to do next, and she beckons them to the pantry to receive their after-school snacks. Laddu and Sita sit against the wall in the main hall, Janaki in one of the doorways to the garden. Janaki expects to be asked questions, but she’s not. Sita and Laddu look proud and anxious to be noticed. Sita creeps gradually closer until she can take Thangam’s hand. Thangam lets her, without clasping the hand in return.
Saradha comes into the hall from the kitchen, bustling and bouncing, straightening things that don’t really need straightening. Janaki watches her and understands that, annoying as her methods are, this is her peculiar way of giving herself a feeling of stability. She listens, disturbed, to Vani’s music. It sounds mad this afternoon, twirling and popping like Deepavali fireworks off the roof above them. She thinks she recognizes “Jaggadodharana,” a song of praise for Lord Krishna, but each note is scissored frighteningly into sixteenths, blurring its sound. She hums along—yes, it is that song—and starts singing the lyrics, about the god born to a mortal, and his mother playing with him, as though he is merely her plump, silken baby, hers to hold, out of the world’s eye. Janaki first heard the song at a wedding a year earlier, and made a relative there teach her the words. Lord Krishna is humanity’s essence and its saviour, says the song, and his mother plays with him as though he is no more than her precious baby.
Then Vairum blurs through the pantry door and pulls up sharp at the sight of his sister and her mass of offspring, and Janaki suddenly remembers when Vani went away to have her baby and it died. Janaki has often thought about this cousin who vanished before she ever had the chance to meet him. It took her a while to understand that, unlike her and her sisters and brother, who have all been taken away and all eventually returned, this baby will never arrive here. She has always wondered what he looked like—crystal crossed with a moonbeam? A bubble on a cloud, attached to the world by dew-covered spider lines. They tore and he floated away. Had he come to live with them, he would have been Janaki’s special companion, her complement, she thinks. He would have seen light where she saw dark, he would have been Vani’s melody to Janaki’s taalam. She used to crave dirt; he might have licked whitewash from clean corners and she alone would know.
Vani hits and pulls furious strings. The melody hammers on the drone as Janaki’s imaginings plink glassily onto the brick floor and she drowses, half in sun, half in shade, her hand half-consciously tapping the song’s rhythm on her knee. She’s awakened by Sita knocking on her head.
“I’m going to go have a veena lesson like I always do at this time,” she remarks pointedly. “I’ll wake you up when it’s time for supper.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Janaki starts toward the back of the house. “Let me change, wait for me,” she calls over her shoulder as she runs.
At four o‘clock, as every Monday and Wednesday, she and Sita have a veena lesson at Gayatri’s house, with a terrible teacher of good family engaged by Gayatri’s mother-in-law. Gayatri had invited Sita and Janaki to participate since her daughter Akila was quite young and it would help to have older girls along, since she knew Janaki would like nothing better, and since she couldn’t invite Janaki without inviting Sita. Janaki ekes all she can from their teacher’s limited store of knowledge, while Sita, though she loves the idea of having lessons, is terrible and never practises. Still, Gayatri and Sivakami privately agreed that any constructive activity could help curb Sita’s destructive impulses, and Gayatri was glad to help Sivakami, much as she disliked having Sita in the house. Even if Sivakami had intended to give her granddaughters veena lessons, which she hadn’t, it would be impossible for the girls to receive a teacher at home, given that teachers generally teach in exactly the hours when Vani conducts her own afternoon session.
Sita will, of course, have left by the time Janaki gets out of her school uniform and into a regular paavaadai, and Janaki knows this, but changes quickly just in case. Sita has gone, so Janaki trots to the back door off the courtyard and leans out peering to her left, so she can see Bharati, who sits beneath a mango tree as she always does at this time.
“His.”
“His.”
Bharati points up in Vani’s direction with a mystified expression; Janaki purses her brows and shrugs in agreement. Bharati closes her eyes. Janaki goes to her veena lesson.
After he finishes with them, their teacher goes west, out of the Brahmin quarter, to the very edge of Cholapatti, to Bharati’s house, where he gives his last lesson of the day.
It’s midday break, at school the next day. Janaki and Bharati choose their position, and their friends close in uncertainly.
“I knew your amma had finally arrived,” Bharati opens, “because Nandu Vadyar showed up for my lesson with a gold stripe across his forehead.”
While Janaki and Sita had been at their lesson, Thangam had taken up her old position on the veranda, and Brahmin-quarter residents paid calls into the early evening. They would greet Thangam and, despite receiving little if any acknowledgement, would pinch stripes of gold dust off the veranda to apply to their foreheads and those of their loved ones.
“Yes.” Janaki smiles, wondering why she feels shy. “She was there when I got home, with my little sisters.”
“And she wants a boy, doesn’t she?” Bharati is poking at the contents of her lunch, which, Janaki notices with a little inward shudder, includes eggs. “Brahmins always want boys.”
Janaki doesn’t really know how to answer. Who doesn’t want boys?
Another of their friends, not Brahmin but close, blithely advises them, “My father wanted a girl by the time I was born. They had seven sons already.”
Bharati’s sneer startles them, though Janaki had noticed her gritting her teeth.
“My grandmother says all of your castes talktalktalk about how the good of the family is on the woman’s shoulders, how she is the strength and wealth and culture, but no one really believes that, they just want dowries, so they want son after stupid son. Pooh! My mother wanted girls and she has girls.”
They are too young to ask how it is that Bharati’s mother got girls just because she wanted them. Some people are lucky that way, after all: they get what they want. Bharati gives the impression that she too will be such a person.
“Oh, Janaki!” Bharati claps her hands.
“What?” Janaki asks with irritation. Why does Bharati so often make her feel as though she is losing? Aren’t they on the same team?
“It’s Sanskrit lesson, right after lunch,” Bharati says as though repeating herself. “We get to hear what happens next in
Shakuntalam.”
Their friends try to look interested but not too interested: as regards Sanskrit, Bharati and Janaki are in a class by themselves. By themselves in a class of girls two years older, that is: they are sufficiently advanced that they take Sanskrit with the sixth-standard girls instead of with the fourth. In the advanced levels, the girls’ Sanskrit master is the same as the boys’, young Kesavan (not really so young any more, but he will be called “young Kesavan” until his death at the age of eighty-four). It is partly for this reason that Bharati and Janaki participate in the advanced class: each of them already receives home tutoring from Kesavan. Bharati has taken Sanskrit tutoring since she was four; her mother considers it part of a girl’s mandatory education. Janaki vaguely guesses this is some kind of a tradition in their caste but somehow feels shy to ask questions about it.