And it grew large: it was only when Sivakami began noticing Rukmini’s tummy that she inquired. Rukmini had been a sturdy woman, with the flat stomach and well-proportioned hips that are the preserve of childless women. Now she has grown considerably thinner, though her tummy has inflated like a rubber tire.
When Sivakami told Rukmini she was not looking well, Rukmini didn’t understand, because saying someone has grown thin is also used as a formality, a greeting, to show concern. So it took a few tries before Sivakami could make clear that she genuinely thought Rukmini was looking very thin and that her swelling stomach might be a cause for concern. She asked if, perhaps, Rukmini could, after all these years, be pregnant. Rukmini laughed and blushed, clapped her cheeks and made slapping motions in the air with her hands.
“No, no,” she said, “I’m not pregnant. Really, the thought!” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You remember, Janaki came to help me just two weeks ago—I still get my monthlies.”
Sivakami shrugged. “Sometimes—rarely, but I’ve heard of it—women get their periods even when they’re pregnant. Or at least bleed a little.”
“Possibly,” Rukmini said politely, “but I really don’t think I’m pregnant. I don’t feel any different. Just a bit weak, maybe.”
Sivakami gave her some holy ash from Palani mountain, known for its potency in expelling unwanted foreign bodies while strengthening desirable ones. She also told Rukmini to drink a broth nightly of her brother Venketu’s patented Cure-All Concentrate
TM
, as a purgative and blood-thickener. She had many extra jars, since Venketu’s wife sent a care package of their products every time a granddaughter came to Sivakami’s house to give birth.
Sivakami also advised Rukmini to take doses of their gripe water, since she had developed a terrible gas problem. Sometimes Sivakami herself would hear, from within her own house, Rukmini’s prodigiously windy emissions. Neighbourhood children shamelessly imitated the poor woman’s range of belches and farts. The sound rose even above the wash of the canal.
Rukmini conscientiously followed every prescription, but her misery did not abate. Her tummy was hard to the touch. She looked like a dying willow with a parasitic fungus clinging to its trunk.
As if all this weren’t hard enough on a woman’s vanity, Rukmini’s hair began coming out in handfuls. Rukmini’s hair had always been a bit thin, and she owned a couple of hairpieces, for special occasions. Now her own measly strands were barely sufficient to hold them on. Finally, she was reduced to sheltering her pate under her sari end, like a widow or Muslim. She was misery incarnate. Her only joy was Krishnan.
So Sivakami’s heart burned at the thought of tearing Krishnan from Rukmini’s bony bosom. How could she? How could she not?
Three nights running, Sivakami has awoken from the same dream, her heart thrumming and brow running with it, clear and cryptic as a telegram.
In the dream, Rukmini’s long-dead mother-in-law, Annam, looked at an illustrated catalogue of hairpieces. The pieces kept trying to scurry away off the pages and into the scrub. The mother-in-law seemed to be charged with minding them, though she would occasionally pick one up and tug at it until it loosened a bit and then study it, flattening it or holding it up to the sun, making the hairpiece whimper or shriek.
Sivakami was puzzled: Annam was a widow when she died, and so she appeared in the dream, with a head stubbly as a coconut. A widow has no need or use for hairpieces. Annam replied that soon her daughter-in-law would come and take the hair from her stomach. Oh, said Sivakami. So Rukmini’s stomach is full of hair? Yes, said Annam, she will come and take the hair from her stomach and fashion it into hairpieces.
Sivakami tried reason, the worst tactic one can attempt in a dream. “But why would Rukmini make hairpieces?”
“If my daughter-in-law is dead, she will not get my son’s money,” Murthy’s mother explains. “She will need some income, so she will have to make hairpieces to sell.”
“Who will get your son’s money, then?” asked Sivakami. This was not reason, but curiosity: if she had been awake, she might have asked what use a dead woman has for money.
“Our grandson,” the woman replied.
Halfway between wake and sleeping, she felt dread. In that dream voice that takes all the effort of shouting, Sivakami argued, “You have no grandson.”
“Oh,” said Rukmini’s mother-in-law, “we have a grandson, you and I.”
Here Sivakami really woke, gasping as though breathing through cobwebs. She didn’t discuss this with Muchami on the way to or from her bath, but finally, three days later, they talked. Muchami had heard of a poison that causes a big ball to grow in the stomach and long hairs to grow from it, until the victim’s life is crowded from her belly. They admit between them that they fear Rukmini’s cousins are poisoning her to get her husband’s house and possibly his money. They admit, shaking, that if the cousins consider him a threat, Krishnan may be poisoned next. They must remove him from that house.
That morning, Sivakami dispatches Janaki and Kamalam to fetch their little brother to eat pazhiah sadam at home. As he eats, she examines his stomach for signs of swelling, but Krishnan’s shorts look as baggy as ever. She asks, “Have you had stomach aches lately, Krishnan-baby?”
Krishnan furrows his brow—is this is a trick to get him to take an extra dose of castor oil? Sivakami grunts in such a way as not to make him more suspicious, and says nothing more.
While Krishnan is eating, however, Muchami slips next door to have a conference with Murthy, and when Krishnan goes back next door, Rukmini wails, “Go home, kanna! You don’t live here, you don’t belong here, we don’t want you.”
Krishnan stands still, confused, not only because Rukmini is shouting all this, each phrase louder than the last, but because she has fallen to her knees and embraced him, so he couldn’t move even if he wanted to.
Janaki and Kamalam appear, having been instructed by their grandmother to come and bring their little brother home again. He looks over his shoulder, sees them and flings his arms around Rukmini’s neck, howling, “I won’t go!”
Janaki starts to cry—she cannot do this, not so soon after Thangam’s death. She leans against a wall, tears coursing from unblinking eyes. Kamalam, silent and alarmed, takes her elder sister by the hand and the shoulder and leads her home.
Three rooms away, in the courtyard, Murthy’s cousins half-pretend they don’t know what is happening. Murthy tears his hair quietly on the veranda, waiting to accuse his cousin once Krishnan is safely out of the picture. What a sorry state the world is in, he tells Sivakami later, thanking her for having sent Muchami with that alert, when one trusts a servant over one’s flesh and blood.
Finally Rukmini tries to thrust Krishnan from her. His little hands pinch and scrabble and he starts again to yell, but Rukmini eventually pins his arms to his sides, kisses every feature of his face and runs from the room, her stomach visible on either side of her.
Krishnan tries to follow, but she closes a door against him. Sita arrives within minutes, with Muchami, who carries Krishnan home.
The cousins object when confronted, denying that they have done anything, saying the accusations are outrageous. Then they steal away in the night, more outlaws than in-laws.
It would have been safe then for Krishnan to return. Certainly, he tries it, meekly. He and Rukmini have visits, but Muchami and Murthy don’t face protests when they carry him home each dusk. Over the next six weeks, Rukmini grows gaunt. Her stomach, though it grows no bigger, becomes painful. For the final ten days of her illness, she is confined to bed, able to take nothing but a little water. Then she, too, expires.
Circumstances being suspect, Rukmini is made to submit in death to the doctor’s examination she refused in life. Cause of death is listed as cancer of the stomach, but in fact, the doctor has never seen a growth like this one—a wrinkled tumour, like a mammoth brain, but from it grow long, matted hairs, five feet long in places. He considers removing it for research—maybe he could write a paper?—but concludes the tropics have robbed him of his professional ambition—he has no desire to take the trouble of preserving and analyzing it. It is a curiosity, but it is not going to make him famous. It is too bizarre for that—just a bit of a novelty. He sews the woman’s stomach up, the flaps baggy over the deflated cavern, and sends word that the family may have her back for her funeral.
Surely little Krishnan must have done something very bad in a previous life, Sivakami thinks, the night after Rukmini’s funeral, watching the child sleep between his elder sisters. How else could it be that a child never really knows a mother at all and yet loses not one mother but two? It’s a riddle fit for gods, who are fond of perversity.
She thinks back on the scandals she has been witness to in these months and wonders, trying to keep herself from feeling prurient, how many there have been on the Brahmin quarter that she doesn’t know about. She wonders why she works so hard to keep up appearances—surely everyone’s family has misfortunes. Surely they are nothing to be ashamed of. She doesn’t condemn either Minister or Murthy for having madness and criminality in their families, but if she didn’t know them better, she might. She might wonder if these traits would rear their ugly heads in others among their families. Say if she was considering a bride or groom from a family within which lurked such shadows.
This, of course, is why she has invested such energy and effort in keeping the facade of her family stainless. Thank God no scandal has enmeshed them yet, though she often senses a circling threat. Goli’s behaviour is so unpredictable; Vairum’s beliefs are so unconventional.
It’s just my imagination
, she tells herself.
They would never do anything to hurt the children. Well, Vairum wouldn’t. And Goli would never hurt them deliberately ...
She looks at the children, as blameless and earnest in sleep as in waking, and says a quick prayer to her gods against the evil eye: please let it remain so. Thangam’s children’s futures are precarious as it is. Sivakami is their only guarantor and all she can give them is their reputations.
33.
A Suitable Girl 1941-1942
WITH THE LONG, DARK YEAR OF MOURNING finally ended, Janaki becomes eligible for marriage. Horoscopes begin arriving, but Vairum insists that Sivakami disregard them. Every marriage begets another, as the saying goes, and it takes only one such function for Vairum to target a family he considers suitable: relatives of Vani’s who live in her hometown, Pandiyoor, a market town close to the city of Madurai, some seventy miles south and inland from Cholapatti.
Closely related to Vani, and distantly to Gayatri, they are a grand and wealthy family. The eligible son is the youngest of three boys; there are also three daughters, all married and well-off. Vairum has a long-standing casual acquaintance with the father.
Sivakami does not see how this is going to work. It’s well and good for Vairum to say he has no truck with astrology—he has always had strange notions and she has never been able to influence him—but, she asks him timidly, what sort of a family would marry their child off without the advice of the ancient science?
“It’s not a science.” Vairum is as brusque with Sivakami as she is gentle with him, as dismissive as she is credulous. “It’s inexact and manipulative. I won’t consider any family who can’t recognize that.”
Sivakami withdraws, suitably cowed. Astrology has brought her misery her whole life—she’s not going to argue further for it. She has no doubt it will be operative, no matter what Vairum does, but maybe, for once, she would rather not know the future.
Vairum doesn’t bother explaining that he doesn’t yet know if this family is as willing as he to undertake a modern marriage. One of his reasons for targeting prospects above the middle class is that the upper echelons tend to be more sophisticated in such matters. The family’s elder sons work as lawyers—they employ reason and logic, even in highly emotional circumstances. This detail, he thinks, bodes well.
But how to handle protocol when the usual formalities are so pointedly not to be observed? Vairum is a man of forethought and has considered this. The matching of horoscopes is the primary method his community uses to arrange marriage, but
the Laws of Manu
describe others: kidnapping, for instance, trickery, sorcery. Vairum opts for enticement, targeting the boy’s mother, a formidable aesthete and lover of the intellectual arts, a woman who Vairum guessed might appreciate those virtues Janaki has so consistently cultivated. He need only find or create the means to display her in all her eminent suitability
He suspects an opportunity will arise before long. The daughters of the Pandiyoor household are gadabouts and use any excuse to travel for functions. In November, he hears from Vani that they will come to Cholapatti to celebrate Gayatri’s granddaughter’s first birthday, and he hastens from Madras to brief his mother and Gayatri.
“Concocting such a womanish scheme,” Gayatri marvels to Sivakami in a rare pause for breath amidst her preparations for the function. “Who would have suspected him capable?”
Sivakami doesn’t respond, and Gayatri reassures her.
“I think it’s wonderful, Sivakami Akka. I have met this boy, Baskaran. He is a nice boy, very devoted to his parents.”
“Hm.” Sivakami feels she needs more information. “Is he a college graduate?”
Gayatri raises her eyebrows. “I suppose not.” She purses her lips and continues. “What I have heard is that Baskaran completed his second year at American College in Madurai. He is an intelligent boy. But then his grandfather died, and his father became sad, it’s understandable. He was having difficulty managing at home, and so on. The father, Dhoraisamy, had inherited the responsibility for a charitable foundation his uncle... ?” Gayatri pauses, frowning. “Maybe his father? Someone established this charity—I don’t remember. But there is a paadasaalai and a chattram, and Dhoraisamy now is the in-charge of managing them. The elder sons work as lawyers, perhaps they are too busy or not so interested in family affairs. So Baskaran stayed home and helped. He is very devoted to his parents.”