The Toss of a Lemon (62 page)

On Tuesdays and Fridays, girls have oil baths. Today Janaki must administer her own, for the first time ever. She sniffs a little with self-pity as she works the oil through her hair as best she can, and goes to rub it out with soap-nut powder in the bath, leaving Raghavan and her mother under a neighbour’s watch.

She comes back into the main hall, holding both ends of the thin cotton towel and snapping it against her hair, from neck to waist, then binding the hair into the towel so that it makes a knot the size of three hearts at the nape of her neck. She and her sisters certainly have been blessed with hair, she most of all.

Thangam is lying waxen and small on her cot, burning again with the fever.

Raghavan awakens and wants his mother. Janaki consoles him, giving him sweet milk, bathing him and singing “Jaggadodharana,” with its lyrics about Lord Krishna:
His motherplays with him, as though he is no more than her precious child
. It is raining too hard to go outside. They play with pots and pans and two of the dolls their father bought. Janaki makes as much noise as he does. She wants their mother to hear them playing.

The servant comes to sweep and mop, quiet and fearful. When she leaves, Janaki breathes, relief: morning is past and Thangam is still alive. If she can just hold on until evening—they’re only five hours from Cholapatti, so Sivakami should be here by what, five or six?

She removes the towel and mechanically binds just the ends of her hair, which is now so little damp it feels not so much wet as heavy. The small knot hits the back of her thighs, the hair loose enough to finish drying, but not unbound, since a woman’s hair should never be unbound except when she performs her parents’ funeral rites. “The sight of a woman with unbound hair strikes sadness into all hearts,” Sivakami, very strict in this regard, would say.

Janaki scrapes the doughy mass that was the golu into some newspapers and tosses it out behind the house. The neighbour comes, brings food and plays with Raghavan. Janaki again makes sure they do it close to Thangam. They unshroud the gramophone and play each record three times. The laughing one sounds stranger each time: at first it sounds eerie, the second time as if it’s mocking them. By the third playing, it doesn’t even sound like laughter any more.

The neighbour leaves to prepare her family’s tiffin. Janaki isn’t hungry but feeds Raghavan. She sits by her mother and sings the first two songs from last night’s concert, which feels so long ago. She tries to hum “Chinnan Cheeru Killiyai Kannama” but can’t remember how it goes. The baby inside Thangam seems to wake, kicking and swimming.

Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock... the cuckoo, which Janaki is coming to hate, pops out each hour to announce to her that her grandmother still has not come.

Thangam is breathing but not moving. She looks bluer and bluer, or is that the fallen night? Janaki lights a lamp for warmth.

There is a knock. She leaps and unbolts the door, but it’s her father. He thrusts a paper packet into her hand. “Here.”

Veeboothi—he must have passed a temple on his rounds. Janaki carries it to Thangam, smears it on her forehead, throat and belly, and puts a pinch between her lips. Previously, it would have shown grey against gold; now it merely dulls the waxy blue surface of Thangam’s skin. Janaki rubs it in but the ash resolves into nubbins and disperses into flakes, refusing to absorb.

Janaki serves her father the food the neighbour has brought. For a second unending, undying night, Janaki sits beside her mother. She prays without ceasing, saying Shakti Mata, Durga Mata, Saraswati whose names are Uma, Vani, Saradha and nine hundred and ninety-eight more. Bring me my grandmother, oh don’t let my mother die. She looks at the Saraswati calendar she hung on the wall, the face of the goddess sweet and impartial.

She presses her mother’s legs, holds her hand and strokes her forehead while her father sleeps. Her little brother sleeps, his golden eyes shut tight. She doesn’t know why Amma has not come. She fears she has been abandoned. She fears the rain rain rain has washed the world away, washed the universe clean, shining, empty. All the people she loves, all those she doesn’t love, all washed away. Are they all alone, too, waiting for one another? Are they all together, waiting for her? Is she late and are they wondering what is keeping her? Has the rain washed her away, too, clean and empty, no guilt no ambition no short history of minor transgressions no unwanted wisdom left to pollute her and tear her gently limb from limb?

They are nine who issued from this womb that is even now still pulsing, poking and bumping, though not as much as before—the stubbornness, the wilfulness, perhaps diminishing. They are nine, and those kicks are of the tenth, but Janaki is sitting alone with only the soft whistle of her brother’s nose to remind her that there are others too who will be orphaned to the world in the swirling raining dark.

But dark always turns to light and it does this time, too. The rain stops; morning breaks grey and awful. Janaki does not move. Her mother is still; her father is still sleeping.

SIVAKAMI DIDN’T GO TO HEAR VANI’S RADIO CONCERT, but the children did, at Gayatri and Minister’s house. That night, though, the sixth of the Navaratri festival, Sivakami didn’t sleep at all. She rarely sleeps much, but the first couple of nights of the festival had been good and tired her out. From the third night, though, she had been waking with feelings of dread and finally, this night, couldn’t muster the will to sleep. For the first time ever, she made mistakes in her beading, giving a poor cow five eyes before she realized what she had done.

Muchami arrived at 3:45, as every morning, and they walked to the Kaveri, where, as always, she bathed in the dark while he stood guard. This morning, as happens sometimes, she was accompanied at the river by a slim figure in diaphanous white, not unlike her own. It floated above the opposite bank, bobbing a bit like a current or breeze. The first time it happened, thirty years ago, she had asked Muchami who it was. “Probably Mariamman,” he had shrugged. Sivakami normally takes comfort in the village goddess’s presence, though she thinks she shouldn‘t, since these Dravidian deities are generally malicious. The goddess had, however, meant no harm before this—or not succeeded in causing any. Why was Sivakami unsettled by her on this day?

At the house, she hung up her wet garment and readied her brass pot and travelling bundle in dread certainty.

This is the thirty-fourth year since the marriage of the girl of gold, the year the astrologers foretold for her death, and when the telegram came, Sivakami didn’t wail or gnash.

The first births added years to Thangam’s life, the astrologers had told Sivakami. The last births took them off again.

Sivakami took the telegram and walked the half-furlong to Gayatri’s house. It must have been more than thirty years since she had walked on the street of the Brahmin quarter in daylight. Her feet felt detached, her body bobbing lightly above them, floating diaphanous white.

Minister read the telegram, set about replying, organized the journey. Muchami assisted. Sivakami returned home to awaken Laddu, Kamalam, Radhai, Krishnan and Sita, who was seven months pregnant and home for her bangle ceremony, to what might be the worst day of their young lives. On the way home, she encountered Rukmini, doing her kolam, and told her to prepare to travel.

By mid-morning, the party boarded the train. Muchami was made to stay behind for the sake of matters quotidian. On the platform, as the train gathered speed, he raised his face and, with the force of his eyes, gazed them safely out of the station.

They rocked silently in the carriage, all faintly nauseated. The atmosphere was so moist they felt they could chew it to slake their throats. Ten minutes out of Salem, the turgid air exploded into drops, stinging their warm faces like forgiveness as they shut the windows against the storm.

The closer they got to Munnur, the stronger the rain. Dismounting in the little station, they found the earth around the unsheltered platform eroded into sharp cliffs descending to choppy brown seas. They waited while Minister inquired of the station master, a droopy little man in a cubicle, where they might find the revenue inspector’s home. He seemed at first reluctant to divulge directions, and Minister suspected him of being involved in one of Goli’s schemes, holding a grudge or wanting to protect him. Then he realized that the station master was simply worried about their ability to negotiate the passage, which would involve walking about four furlongs, crossing the river and walking another furlong on the other side. With some relief, Minister dismissed the man’s worries and set out, lifting the smaller children down from the platform and hurrying everyone up the flooded roadway, all the children’s hands grasped tight. It was soon clear that the man’s fears were justified, but, by a hundred yards, the rain descending like screens, the water filling their eyes, they could barely make out the station behind them and so pressed forward to the river, where they paused on her banks in respect and dismay.

The Kaveri was swollen and rough and in a lethal mood. It was mid-afternoon but even with the light at its highest, the streaming rain obscured the opposite bank. Minister, feeling valiant, made as though he would swim across, but Sivakami forbade it. Even in calm moods, this river made sport of men in the prime of their lives. Sivakami herded them into some bankside groves to shelter.

Curious villagers ventured forth and expressed sorrow when they learned of the circumstances. They were not so irreverent as to offer the travellers their homes—this was the non-Brahmin side of the village—but they brought sheets of thatch to shelter them and fruits Brahmins may eat without fear of pollution. The villagers told the party that the rain would clear by morning, when they would be able to cross by
parasal,
a round boat towed by swimmers.

Within an hour, Visalam arrived from Karoor with her baby and husband. The sympathetic villagers clucked and cooed and set up a baby hammock between some bamboo stalks, with a waterproof crosshatch of thatch to protect the child from the elements.

Just before dark, Saradha came from Thiruchinapalli. After midnight, the rain ceased and the sky began to thin. The moon, thought Sivakami, was weak from crying. She shook the thought off disdainfully. She alone was awake in the party to recognize the stooped and purposeful gait of her son approaching on the riverlike road, Vani glowing beside him. Now Sivakami’s tears began to fall, hard as the rain, from both eyes. Vairum and Vani approached, and Vani fell to embrace Sivakami’s feet. Sivakami put her hands on Vani’s shoulders and raised her into an embrace. Vairum said nothing but waited to speak until his mother’s eyes were dry, the tears wiped away by Vani.

“I have spoken to several villagers,” he said then, soft and brusque. “I believe we must wait until morning to cross.”

Vani pressed Sivakami’s hands and Sivakami leaned her forehead against that of her son’s wife. They waited for the dawn.

Before dawn, all did their ablutions, the men saying the daily prayer for illumination, and then light broke saffron in the east. Six village men appeared, carrying a round, shallow boat of woven reeds, which they held at the river’s edge. Sivakami, Minister and Laddu got in. Laddu tried to insist he would swim, but Vairum forbade it. When the village men tied gourds around their waists as life preservers, though, Vairum and Sita’s husband did the same, and took places at the boat’s side as they began towing the boat across. By the time the sun laid its palms on the water’s surface, the first party was halfway across.

Through her fear, Sivakami wondered where Vairum learned to swim so well. She had made him pledge, when he left for college, that he would never swim in the Kaveri. She didn’t need to ask him to study, to be frugal, to eschew bad habits. Vairum rose on the other bank, braced his hands on his knees and coughed. He turned toward Thangam’s house.
At least there are no predictions against his life,
Sivakami thought.
None that I know of.

Yesterday, Janaki had not felt the day on her face except in the hour before dawn when she did the kolam that the rain washed away even as the powder descended from her fist. Today she does not do kolam but opens the door only after the light is full. And opens her eyes wide because Laddu is running toward her up the road. He pants the news out hoarsely: “We are here, we are all here, we couldn’t cross the river yesterday evening, too flooded, we had to wait for light...” His hands are on his knees as he stoops to catch his breath. “Parasals—they are bringing the others across.”

Next comes Vairum. He strides first to the doorway where she is standing, her hair loose around her. Vairum goes past her into the house and looks at his sister lying blue on the cot, her womb an expectant silence.

Goli sits up in the spot where he has been sleeping, his forehead in his hands, cradling his big dreams. He looks up to see his wife’s brother. He puts his head back in his hands.