The Toss of a Lemon (7 page)

Dawn breaks upon him. He has been sitting still a long time. Dew trickles down his neck, as if the morning sees he’s not sweating and thinks he should.

He has read that he will die.

Sooner, that is, rather than later. His weak quadrant has an astrological alignment with his son’s birth time, and this has darkened the shadow of death. The discus of the little boy’s stars will cut Hanumarathnam’s lifeline within three years.

At the eleventh-day naming ceremonies, Hanumarathnam goes through the motions. It’s not conspicuous: everyone is just going through the motions, as people do at these things. But Sivakami notices and is concerned : Hanumarathnam has not tried to get close to his son. With his daughter, he is still all fond smiles and lifting and swinging, though Sivakami perceives a sadness there too.

Why not the boy? Why not the boy? Sivakami wonders as she waits out the remainder of the thirty-one days’ seclusion. After a girl baby, seclusion lasts forty-one days, so Sivakami has another reason to be grateful for a boy: she couldn’t have borne this strange worry as long as that. Finally, Hanumarathnam comes to escort her home.

He makes his wife comfortable with the baby, who is a bit of a fusser, in the back of the bullock cart. Maybe that’s it, she thinks, the whimpering and whinging. It doesn’t bother her, but maybe that’s why his father keeps his distance. Or the baby’s looks: they don’t make her feel strange, but maybe they do his father? Sivakami is feeling sensitive: her eldest and youngest sisters-in-law had made a few remarks—the sort that sound kind-hearted but sting. “He’s obviously so alert, must be very intelligent, and what do good looks really matter for anyway?” and, with a little shudder, “Oh! Those eyes just look right through a person, don’t they?”

Hanumarathnam sits up front with his lovely daughter, showing her the sights, until her eyes are heavy. Then she leaves him to come and lie in back with her mother, where she insists on keeping one hand on the baby, as though the cart were a big cradle for both of them. Thangam has said nothing about her new little brother, but it is clear that she doesn’t share the world’s repulsion. Daily, since his birth, she has brought him gifts, sweets Sivakami pretends to feed him, for Thangam’s sake, and pretty leaves he crushes in a fist. She would squat on small haunches watching him almost without blinking, for half an hour at a time, until an aunt startled her by calling her name. If anyone asked her about him, though, she gave no answer but her vague, incurious gaze, and since the questions rarely needed answers—“You must be so proud, a big sister, eh, Thangam?”—the asker just pinched her cheek and turned away.

When Hanumarathnam brings Thangam to the back, he looks at the baby without speaking, and then returns to the front to sit with the servant who has come along as driver. Sivakami’s mind keeps running on in speculation: maybe he thinks the boy doesn’t look like him? But who can tell with a mashed-up barely one-month-old? She is feeling ill now, much as Hanumarathnam did on this journey just after his son’s birth. It is a variety of motion sickness, caused not by the rock-bump-sway of the animals and cart, but by the ringing and ricocheting of her thoughts as they tumble along and drag her behind.

They reach home by nightfall. That night, he sleeps, she doesn’t.

In the morning, they go through more motions. Sivakami watches Hanumarathnam: his movements look stiff, his face unnatural. She can feel the pressure of whatever he is thinking on her temples, on her chest, but she cannot guess at it and finally cannot bear it any longer. When he comes into the main hall for his mid-morning meal, the baby is napping and Thangam has gone next door to play with the still-childless Rukmini. Sivakami crumples to the floor and cracks out a plea through clenched teeth and tears, “Oh, my lord, my lord. What is happening? What is wrong?”

He immediately drops to his own knees, lifting Sivakami’s face to his and thinking how he loves her.

“Little one ... I ...” Where should he begin? With which small fact or hope? “I’m sorry, I...”

Sivakami is watching his face, her lips parted, trying to read what he is not telling her. He turns away so as to be able to tell her himself.

“I told your father when I proposed that...” He glances back and away again. “Let me explain. You know that if something is written in the weakest quadrant of one’s horoscope, it is extremely unlikely, yes?”

“Okay ...” She has never heard this before, but the interpretation of horoscopes was never of particular interest to her.

“Your father and uncles knew that, and for the sake of honesty, I told them that my death in the ninth year of my marriage was written in that very weakest quadrant.”

Sivakami sits back on her haunches, no longer weeping, looking resolute and skeptical. “But...”

He will not be hurried. “Often, the birth of a son changes the relation of the stars, can even erase the shadow of death from the father’s horoscope.”

“Our son cannot have done that,” she says, sad and matter-of-fact.

“My calculations following our son’s birth show that Yama’s water buffalo has advanced from the weakest quadrant to the strongest,” he quietly agrees. “The god of death will surely come to take my soul in the third year of the boy’s life.”

“Ayoh!” Sivakami cries now. “Ayoh, Rama!”

“It is not the child’s fault...” Hanumaratham says as though it could be. “But he has killed me.”

She is now leaning on a pillar, he kneeling in front of the Ramar triptych, the glare of the street just out of sight through the front doors, reflecting into the hall along with the distant sound of daily life, but they don’t stay like that for long.

Sivakami soon pulls herself to her feet, and her feet carry her mechanically to the well. She washes her face, the face she has had and known for more than sixteen years—a long time, by some standards. She feels hard new lines drawn there by her husband and son. What will be written on those lines? Maybe they can read what she can‘t, these men who know so much. She returns to the hall and asks, “And so. What now?”

Her husband sees what she has felt on her face. He thinks,
Look
,
two children, and no trace, now, of the girl. She has become a woman. How wonderful, how miraculous, that we go through these stages, walking the path of our lives one foot in front of the other, one in front of the other, this is how we live, this is how to live.
He comforts himself with circular, cloudy thinking, the sort that makes respectable conversation in the face of grief. As if he’s rehearsing to attend his own funeral
.

For now, though, he is still living, and so is Sivakami, and so are their two children, whose needs must be met, so the requirements of life put their feet one in front of the other. They eat and sleep and conduct business even though their life has been poured into a rice-sorting basket and tossed two foot, four foot, six foot in the air.

HANUMARATHNAM TELLS SIVAKAMI that he is going to teach her about household finances, administration of agricultural income, market relations and management of personnel, and that he has hired a new servant, a young boy, who will learn to assist her. If he works out well, and Hanumarathnam has good reason to believe he will, then he will be retained. If not, they will dismiss him and try quickly to find someone else. They cannot be dilly-dallying with this servant as they normally would. It is not enough that he is related to one of their old servants, not enough that he needs a favour, not even enough if he is entertaining or pitiable. He must be efficient, confident and worthy of trust. Hanumarathnam doesn’t need to say the reason: that Sivakami and the servant will be managing the lands on their own in a little more than two years and both must prove themselves capable.

A few days later, the new servant starts. Sivakami is giving the children their baths when she hears the boy call out from behind the door at the rear of their property. How can she help but hear his as one of the voices of death? Yet she herself opens the door. She forces herself, because the few times she has acted maudlin, it only made Hanumarathnam impatient.

The servant, a thirteen-year-old by the name of Muchami, accepts a cup of sugared milk and then leaves to accompany Hanumarathnam on his daily round of some portion of the properties. He walks behind Hanumarathnam out to the fields, then along the narrow hump separating paddy fields one from another and from the plots of other crops. Social imperative dictates that they cannot walk abreast on the street, agricultural imperative that they walk single file between the fields: the dividers between plots are less than a foot wide in places.

Muchami notes his new employer’s sure-footedness. It separates those who walk among the fields from those who don’t. Most landowners sit in their big fine houses and wonder lazily when to expect the rent, not giving it any more thought than that until some crisis passes the point of resolution. Hanumarathnam is obviously a landlord who likes to know what’s transpiring out among the folk, to sort out tangles while they are still small, even to anticipate them. Muchami is of the same mind. He marches proudly in step with his new employer. He decides he likes Hanumarathnam’s looks and tries to match his step to the seigneur’s.

They pause to clear fallen leaves from irrigation canals. They come slowly up beside the white herons that stand in the six inches of paddy water every morning. Only a few move away. Muchami listens patiently as Hanumarathnam tells him things he already knows, such as who the tenant is on each piece of land, his rent, his character and temperament. Muchami has always made it his business to know things. He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance. So he doesn’t listen too closely but dreamily soaks in the sound of Hanumarathnam’s voice, which he might have likened to chocolate had he ever known chocolate. (He never comes closer to chocolate than the sound of that voice.)

When they return, he waits while his employer completes bath, prayers and meal. Hanumarathnam takes his rice meal at ten; Muchami receives the same. He ate already that morning but eats again because he is an accommodating sort of boy and, at thirteen, especially accommodating toward extra meals. Hanumarathnam sits in the main hall, Muchami in the courtyard.

As they eat, Hanumarathnam quizzes Muchami through the open doors of the pantry and kitchen.

“Shanmugham’s sesame field—what’s the northern border?” he calls.

Without missing a mouthful, Muchami calls back, “The teak stand that’s the southern border of Kantha’s turmeric field, Ayya.”

“Shanmugam’s paddy yield last year?”

“What he really got, Ayya, or what he told you?”

“Either one.”

“He paid you seventeen per cent of twenty-two bushels.”

“Other particulars?”

“Particulars you told me or other particulars?”

“Hm...” Hanumarathnam purses his lips. “The latter.”

“His brother’s wife has a cousin who went to work on a rubber plantation in Malaysia and never returned. News came on the wind that he married a beautiful village girl, but she is only a girl during the blue nights. By day, she becomes a monkey, called ‘orange-utange,’ or something.”

Hanumarathnam already has a strong feeling that he and Muchami share a point of view on relations with tenants and have a mutual appreciation of the importance of obscure if irrelevant information to everyday business. For instance, Hanumarathnam is certain that, in the past, tenants were tempted to cheat him. He thinks that he has succeeded in dissuading them by strategically mentioning “other particulars” about the party in question—giving the impression that he knew much more than he said. He’s sure Muchami also knows how to deploy such details to effect.

Next, Sivakami gives Thangam to Muchami to entertain while she begins her portion of the training.

Sivakami must also walk the fields, though she cannot actually walk the fields: were she truly to walk in public view, she would be risking their social position in an attempt to maintain their economic grip. Any respectable Brahmin matron keeps largely out of sight if her family can afford that modesty; a widow must be kept entirely hidden, so as not to expose her shame at her condition.

So Hanumarathnam has laboured to create a middle ground: a detailed map of the holdings for Sivakami to walk through with her eyes and mind. Hanumarathnam has accurately portrayed those properties : real and perceived distances, sizes, and productive capacity of each plot. It is not simply a matter of drawing a map to scale; one must choose what sort of scale: physical? psychological? This map has to show how a property relates to its owners, to itself, to tenants, to the community. This is business—not geography, not math.

Each holding is labelled with the tenant, fee and probable current and projected output. Each of these wants discussing: the age and character of the tenant, the age and character of a particular plot of soil, the problems and promise and possibilities of each. Some tenants have special agreements. They grow plantains for themselves among the coconut trees, for instance, until the coconut trees grow large and require that space. Hanumarathnam gets a slightly larger share of paddy for this, since he and Sivakami have plantains in plenty from their own garden. And what of the paddy to be sold? Selling at the market is an art and the middlemen are crafty. Sivakami and Muchami must be equipped to play this game; they must operate as a team.