The Toss of a Lemon (64 page)

Sivakami watches Vairum and Goli circle, keeping their animosity within the limits of decorum. Goli is sullen but remains present for all the ceremonies where he is required.

During the day, Sivakami remains composed, busy cooking for fifteen people and watching the ceremonies. At night, her sense of devastation returns as if to feed on her.
I thought if I lightened her burden, she thinks, she might hang on. And, The horoscopes have defied me once again.

On one of these nights, Vairum, rising to relieve himself, finds her huddled in a corner, her face hidden in shade, her body illuminated by moonlight. She sleeps directly on the cement floor, its grey turned shades of blue by the night, but now, at three, she is sitting up and weeping.

He pauses before her, hands on hips. “You think she died of a bad horoscope,” he says, his voice ringing quietly. All the other family members sigh and snore, asleep in the hall behind him. He shakes his head. “May the day come when you admit it was his loutishness that killed her, not the stars.”

Sivakami wipes her tears, then puts her hand to her forehead, not looking at him.

“I will arrange the marriages of my sister’s remaining daughters,” Vairum swears, standing over her. “I will...” he chokes, this little boy who swore never to take from his sister, only to give, and who, as she lay dying, could not give her what she needed any more than his mother could. “I will arrange their marriages on terms rational and religious,” he sputters. “No more horoscopes. Let people take responsibility for their actions.”

Thirteen days after Thangam’s death, the priests are paid and a feast prepared to bid the soul pass on.

The next day, the Cholapatti folk make ready to return. Thangam’s elder daughters will also go back there for a time with their children. Goli goes out at some point—no one sees him leave. Presumably, he has gone to back to work, his bereavement leave concluded. They are milling around, feeling it rude not to have bid him farewell, but Vairum hustles them to the train mid-afternoon, reminding them that Goli did not pay them the same courtesy.

At the Cholapatti station, they ask the children of the station master to run and alert Muchami to their arrival so that he can bring the bullock cart. When Sivakami sees Muchami’s familiar silhouette emerge from the now-solid dark, she feels herself relax and come close to tears again.

Muchami jumps down and, putting his palms together and bowing quickly to them several times, sets about loading the baggage. Sivakami gets into the cart first, without saying anything to him. The family had not communicated with him from Munnur, knowing that he would intuit the reason for so long an absence. He fusses over them, asking, “Are you comfortable?”

Vairum has mounted the front. When Muchami hops up beside him and takes the reins, he asks, “So, Vairum, everything taken care of?” Vairum nods perfunctorily. Muchami glances one last time over his shoulder before starting. He catches Sivakami’s eye, and his face crumples.

“Our gold,” he whispers, turning to the front. He twitches the rein against the bullocks backs with a “tch-tch” to get them started. “Pure gold. Such a good girl.”

“Yes, yes,” Vairum sighs. “She deserved much better.”

Muchami weeps audibly for the duration of the trip home while the occupants of the cart behind him are silent, having spent much of their grief during the formal mourning period and being tired from travel. Muchami is far less demonstrative than many servants in his position, who would weep for form’s sake, as servants are supposed to weep for masters, more even than for their own families. Sivakami knows him to be sincere, knows he feels exactly as she does: that while Thangam’s marriage may have killed her—by whatever means—Sivakami had no choice and did the best she could have done.

THE NEXT DAY, hordes of Brahmins from up and down the quarter come to pay condolences. Sivakami wishes she were more like others, like her granddaughter Saradha, for instance, who clearly takes comfort in hearing the same encomiums repeated again and again by people who barely knew Thangam. Instead, as when Hanumarathnam died, Sivakami wishes they would all keep quiet, or, better yet, stay away.

When Muchami’s and Mari’s families come to the back to pay respects, gnashing and screeching as is appropriate in their community, Sivakami wonders if it is within her rights to tell them to leave. Out of consideration for Muchami and Mari, she doesn’t. But Mari does—telling her parents and her mother-in-law that their histrionics are not needed. Mari herself, when she arrived that morning, expressed her condolences to Sivakami with quiet dignity and went about her chores.

In the days after they return from Munnur, little Krishnan takes to sleeping at Rukmini’s house. By the time Sivakami is fully aware that it has become a habit, she is not sure how to break it. It seems cruel to deny a motherless child all he is receiving from Rukmini: he accompanies her in every activity; at home, he sits in her lap; they play games, have secret jokes and a code language. Rukmini makes sweets for him daily and bids him bring his sisters to eat them.

Sivakami is in a quandary: she wants Krishnan to enjoy these attentions, but she feels she must remain responsible, in certain ways, for his moral and physical upkeep. She also thinks Rukmini might be too soft, too grateful for Krishnan’s presence, to hold to certain old-fashioned child-raising practices.

So Sivakami requires that Krishnan come to take his breakfast at her house: pazhiah sadam, day-old rice, mixed with yogourt—the best thing for a young tummy. One of his sisters feeds him—Sivakami herself cannot touch it because it is kept to ferment overnight. Every Wednesday and Saturday, she insists he comes to take his oil bath and, every few months, a dose of castor oil. In other words, she asks only that Krishnan complete the severer and less pleasant of his basic requirements at her house because the sense of discipline and plain living these impart—the gifts of a conservative upbringing—will remain the measure of his origins.

Sivakami is motivated by concern not only for Krishnan’s well-being, but also for the family’s. “A house that gives a son for adoption has no sons for seven generations.” The proverb reverberates in her conscience. Krishnan is with her for safekeeping; he belongs to the house of his father. Rukmini may tend him further, but she cannot be allowed to feel he is her son.

Rukmini understands Sivakami’s concerns, though she doesn’t think about them too deeply. She is flattered by the violent resistance Krishnan displays whenever his sisters come to fetch him. While she doesn’t interfere with their missions, neither does she assist.

Krishnan is always reluctant to leave Rukmini—she is his favourite person. He doesn’t respond to cajoling nor to ordering. He is becoming the boy Sivakami meant him to be: precious and headstrong. Nor can his sisters bribe him—little they offer can compete with his treatment at Rukmini’s. Increasingly, they resort to tricks to get him to come home. Fortunately, Janaki proves herself a master of minor deceptions, and enjoys devising them—for a good cause, of course.

Sita stays on to keep company with her family and give them comfort in the wake of Thangam’s death. (Or so goes the protocol. Sita’s specialty has always been discomfort, and relative marital happiness has not gentled her. Her husband is a stable, timid man, a compiler of agricultural statistics who admires and resents her. She is not interested in his feelings, but his behaviour suits her well and she has seen no need to change hers.) When she is the one sent to fetch Krishnan, she blackmails him, explaining to him in a low, sincere voice that unless he comes with her immediately, she will fix it so that he never sees Rukmini again. Krishnan listens, wide-eyed, without reason to disbelieve her, and obeys.

“Poor Akka,” she remarks the Friday after their return to Cholapatti, as she and her sisters sit, after their oil bath, drying their hair.

“Mm-hm,” says Janaki, peering critically at her embroidery, a bouquet of flowers, none of which she recognizes. She drew the pattern after a photo in one of Minister’s books on English gardens.

“Forced to give up her children one by one like that,” Sita continues.

Janaki and Kamalam are silent, Janaki looking at Sita, Kamalam lying on a cot with her hair fanned and falling over the edges, incense burning beneath to perfume it.

“I could never.” Sita shakes her head. “I’d rather die.”

“Well, she didn’t give us up.” Janaki finally rises to the bait. “Amma just looked after us for them because Appa’s job...”

Sita points at Janaki. “Vairum Mama stole us because he’s jealous.”

“No—” Janaki starts.

“And because he hates Appa. He would do anything to sabotage Appa. Poor Appa, just trying to make an honest living, and he has this business shark for a brother-in-law.”

Janaki tries again lamely. “What—”

“Is your hair on fire, Kamalam?” Sita inquires sprightly.

Kamalam, who had let her eyes drift shut, springs up, trembling.

“Oh,” Sita laughs, “I guess it was just the incense smoke. You know I never think you wash the oil out properly. Can’t blame me for worrying!”

Janaki stands. “You look like you could use a nap, Sitakka.” She gestures to Kamalam with her head and starts for the veranda. “Don’t you feel tired?”

“No,” Sita replies. “Where are you two going?”

Around this time, Murthy invites some cousins to stay with him and Rukmini. Down on their luck, as so many Brahmins are these days, they had lost their lands and home, and approached Murthy at a wedding a month or two earlier and appealed to him for assistance.

“We must help our own.” Rukmini parrots her husband’s words to Sivakami the day before the cousins arrive. “So much assistance available to those low-caste types, but Brahmins are as poor as they ever were and no one thinks about what services they give! Who will assist them?”

Sivakami agrees and congratulates her on their generosity. They are not the wealthiest family in the Brahmin quarter—that status has always been reserved for Minister’s family, though she suspects Vairum might have exceeded even them, not that it has changed her lifestyle or the children’s. Murthy and Rukmini are comfortable, though, and childless, and live modestly in a spacious house, built for the large, extended family that has dwindled to these two over the course of three short generations.

These relatives are expected to arrive by bus, and the next day, Murthy, a splash of betel-stained spittle ornamenting his fresh-pressed kurta, borrows Sivakami’s bullock cart to meet them. When he returns the cart, he brings them in to meet her. They huddle together as if persecuted and have to be bid to enter several times, Sivakami calling from the pantry.

They have been travelling and need to bathe, they protest in whimpers. The wife is barely four foot nine, and her husband perhaps two inches taller. Their faces are pinched and ingratiating, their clothing poor. Their son, a strapping, touchy-looking youth, carries their little baggage.

“Welcome,” says Sivakami with energetic friendliness, inspired by Rukmini and Murthy’s caste feeling to ensure they feel warmly received. She sends Janaki and Kamalam out toward them, one with a tray of tumblers of water, the other with plates of snacks. “Eat something small at least. And you must come take a meal here soon. Our home is yours, just as it is Rukmini and Murthy’s.”

The couple, who had been casting looks of rapid appraisal at the Ramar, the safe and the girls’ jewellery, thank her, wagging their heads so vigorously their bodies move. The son smiles meanly and turns to go.

“Ugh,” Sita shudders, when they have barely gone. “Unattractive lot!”

“No more out of you, young lady!” Sivakami’s sharpness startles both her and her granddaughters. “They are in need and it is an act of good to give charity. Rukmini and Murthy will do well in their next lives.”

Sita doesn’t retort but later tells Janaki, “I’m all in favour of caste solidarity, but I have a bad feeling about them.”

Just because Sita said it, Janaki feels compelled to disagree. Privately, though, she fears Sita intuits malignancy all too accurately.

WHAT A STRANGE FEW MONTHS this has been for our dear ones on the Brahmin quarter, Sivakami thinks, a couple of months later. January is drawing in, with the Pongal holiday. They won’t celebrate this festival, nor any other, for a year, while they are in mourning.

In September, Thangam’s death. Then, last month, Gayatri’s mother-in-law had decided someone had hidden a cobra in her bun, and tried to use the scythe to cut off her hair. She killed herself—not as quickly as would have been merciful, but still, it was a relief to the family and probably to the old woman herself, who had for years been living in an increasing state of paranoia.

And now Rukmini is ill. She has been suffering from a severe digestive affliction since about the time Murthy’s cousins came to stay with them. At first, it had seemed no more than heartburn. Rukmini confided in Sivakami: she feared her cousin-in-law’s cooking didn’t agree with her. The cousin was helping in the kitchen. Her cooking tasted wonderful, and it was nice to eat someone else’s food. The cousin cooked Thanjavur-style, and the flavours were quite exotic. But Rukmini had grown scared of eating. She was mystified. The vegetables were not undercooked. She was being served items in the correct order. She had worried that perhaps the cousin-in-law was violating rules of ecchel, the contamination of saliva, and patthu, the contamination of cooked food, which orthodox Brahmins observe strictly. What if she was insufficiently superstitious, one of these progressive sorts, and so was not washing her hands after touching cooked rice, for instance? But the cook, who watched her, said she was quite above board. And no one else in the household was in any discomfort. Rukmini’s stomach alone bloated and kicked after every meal.