The Toss of a Lemon (75 page)

Finding the atmosphere in the women’s room intolerable, Janaki looks for chores to occupy her elsewhere in the house, and comes up with the idea of offering Sanskrit tutorials to the paadasaalai boys. She asks Baskaran to approach the instructor in basic Sanskrit on her behalf.

The pupils are a proud and pitiable crew. Among them are two pairs of brothers, but all eighteen boys look similar: their heads are shaved, leaving a brief kudumi, which hairstyle is now found only in the priestly ranks. They wear a standard-issue dhoti and breast cloth of coarse cotton weave. They are here because their parents cannot afford to give them the quality of nutrition and education the charity will give them, and so have left the children here to be raised in orthodoxy. Janaki might identify with these children more than she would ever admit. She relieves the Sanskrit master of the younger students, delivering the drills and exercises whose practice she perfected in her own questing childhood, and finds, in this work, a release from the pressure-sealed jar of the household.

Baskaran suggests to Janaki that his brothers don’t really want households of their own, run by their wives. “Who would,” he shrugs slyly, “with wives like that?”

Janaki thinks it improper for her to answer, and disloyal, even though she feels little loyalty to her sisters-in-law, especially in this low enterprise.

Baskaran frowns at her. “Is this what you want, also? To have your own home?”

“I absolutely do not.
Chi
!
”

“Good, good,” says Baskaran, smoothing the quilt. “I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” she says irritably as she turns the lamp key down and gets into bed. “Very happy. I couldn’t be happier.”

Families should not even be permitted to think of splitting up. Authority is responsibility, unity is security, Gandhi wants to split from the British, Jinnah wants Muslims to split from India, the non-Brahmins want to split from polite society... how will it end? Think of Vairum and Vani. Janaki tosses and rails in sleep while Baskaran holds the quilt fast.

She dreams of visiting Vasantha Nadu and Swarna Nadu, two countries in a house so large she never sees more than two walls at once. The floor is covered in what Janaki first thinks are enormous kolams coloured in with bright powders, but when she draws near to admire them, she realizes they are maps drawn in rice powder and the differently coloured areas are territories and states, each with its own governor and laws.

Vasantha and Swarna swarm like ants through an anthill, continually brushing away borders and redrawing them differently, quick as Janaki herself erases and redraws kolam lines in the morning when she sleepily connects the wrong dots. Janaki yearns to return to Janakipattu, her own city, but it has been erased, or amalgamated. She is stateless and homeless. Responsible to no one; no one responsible for her. She knows, in dreaming as in waking life, that there is no worse fate—standing still, condemned forever to pass through the strange lands that appear and vanish beneath her unmoving feet.

Clerk ex machina: the meek and ever-reliable accountant, Mr. Kandasamy, provides a means of resolution.

“In chess,” he explains to Dhoraisamy and Baskaran, having clearly rehearsed every word, “this would be called a defensive move, except that, for Sir, and Sir’s family, there is no risk. At this juncture, all the higher castes have reason to fear. If—no, let us say, when Congress assumes power, they will work hard to prove they have no bias toward the Brahmin. They will treat with us severely. We will be thoroughly oppressed. There will not only be the reserved posts for the lower castes in government and colleges, the administrative and educational biases. I have started to suspect there will also be vengeful taxation. It is not without precedent.” Mr. Kandasamy took a breath, marking the end of his magnificent preamble.

Dhoraisamy had worked himself into a complicit lather. “What to do? Our dear Mr. Kandasamy, you alone can advise us.”

“Well.” Mr. Kandasamy mopped his brow, looking earnest and purposeful. “We know that the charity’s finances are thoroughly separate from those of the family. And we have kept them strictly and, more importantly, provably so. However, I do think it my responsibility to warn Sir of possible vulnerability to others who are adept at and interested in manipulation. This is my suggestion: you must house your personal assets in what is known as a ‘tax shelter.’ Have you heard this term?” Mr. Kandasamy looked suddenly a few inches taller, Baskaran reported to Janaki with a giggle, and as though he had more hair.

“No, no, no, no.” Dhoraisamy looked to his son, who also shrugged.

“Permit me to be direct.” Mr. Kandasamy smiled with greater assurance than usual. “Your greatest assets are your own sons, are they not? One thinks it could be wise to house them... in houses. Of their own.”

Baskaran and his father made faces demonstrating shock and reluctant receptiveness. Mr. Kandasamy plowed on. “Give them their share of their personal inheritances and pretend—if only on the books, more than this you need not do except to revenue inspectors and their relatives—you no longer care for them. It is the one way to ensure Sir operates at a loss.”

Mr. Kandasamy, who, Baskaran later remarks, has a surprising flair for drama, allows a decorous silence, within which the mood alters and settles. “I know it must seem a heartless and scandalous notion,” he goes on, “not to keep one’s children and grandchildren under one’s own roof, but many respectable families are considering this, and naturally I would... ahem, one would never suggest that Sir’s sons go further than Single Street.” Finally, Mr. Kandasamy draws a breath to conclude his speech. “The charitable institution was established to propagate the values and good name of our caste. It is my duty to guard against any threat to the institution and its values. I urge Sir to take this suggestion. Avoid any whiff of caste betrayal. Long live the Brahmins!”

Janaki is quite sure Mr. Kandasamy did this because the charity’s finances are not nearly so separate from the household’s as they should be, and he would be out of a job if the charity’s foundation were eaten through. Whether this is a philosophical end gained by practical means, though, or a practical end gained by philosophical means, the results are the same.

The household returns to its former deceptive and uneasy peace. Still, Janaki continues her work, leading Sanskrit tutorials with the paadasaalai students. She has always kept busy, and work is reassuring, especially in times of change.

OTHER CHANGES ARE IMMINENT, too, but these are expected and non-threatening. Janaki, who has always perceived more than she could understand, now embodies changes she cannot control. She has intense cravings for foods that, once she has eaten them, she never wants to see or smell again. She takes long naps and has fits of crying. With joy, relief and fearful apprehension, she watches two months pass without menstruating. The estimate is that she and Baskaran will become parents in summer of 1945, and she imagines herself going to Cholapatti for a visit and returning to Pandiyoor with a child.

Now, when she’s in the women’s room, she is making items for her own child’s layette. Senior Mami has a radio; Janaki turns it on and off for her and listens to programs on current affairs and spiritual matters while doing her handiwork. She practises veena at least three or four times weekly, which is what she is doing when the telegram comes.

A paadasaalai boy peeps around the corner of the doorway to the women’s room; they ignore him. He gradually edges over so that more than half of him is visible along the doorway’s edge. Still, he is ignored. He is evidently here with a message—giving the boys small chores, everyone says patronizingly, is a way of making the pupils feel included in the family.

The boy, a jug-headed child of six with attention problems, starts to fidget and rustle, but Janaki doesn’t notice, over the music. Finally, Swarna sits up and takes the envelope out of the tyke’s hand. Senior Mami, noting the end of the standoff, immediately says, “Here.” But the sisters-in-law, lest anyone forget that they are burrs and must be plucked, and because it amuses them, have kept up their habit of disobeying their mother-in-law. Thus Swarna, hearing Senior Mami’s command, tears open the telegram.

Her eyes bulge, her jaw drops, and she gasps, “Janaki! Your sister!”

That evening, Janaki, accompanied by her husband, is on a bus bound for the town of Kumbakonam. She is wondering how much longer laughter can last in the world, now that it has been returned to its source. Like the heroine Sita, in the Ramayana, swallowed by the earth, Visalam has been taken by the giggling, gurgling River Kaveri in flood.

Janaki knows what the neighbours will be saying. There’s always someone who is taken, in every generation—the question is only who it will be and when. They all will have lost family members and will want to talk about them, and Janaki and her siblings will be forced to be polite while Visalam’s husband and children... how will they bear this loss?

Oh, how she hates the rainy season! Janaki slams the bus window’s shutter against the wet. Baskaran, at her side, says nothing. She starts weeping again and eventually falls asleep on his shoulder. In the dark, he lifts his hand to stroke her cheek and when she shifts, he brings her head to rest on his shoulder once more.

At Visalam’s family’s house, three matrons Janaki has never met rush at her, awash in tears. She feels her bile rising and dashes to bend over some bushes. Baskaran explains about the pregnancy and the ladies cluck. Janaki’s sisters and Visalam’s in-laws jockey past the strangers to take her arms, ushering her in toward a bath and sleep.

The stunned house is quiet. That’s not always the way when tragedy strikes a gregarious people. Visalam’s in-laws had loved Visalam as though she’d been born to them.

Her widower performs the necessary rites. He is in his early thirties but looks ten years older than he did the last time Janaki saw him, six months ago, his laugh lines like cuts in his gaunt face.

Saradha has come from Thiruchi; Sita from Tiruvannamalai; Laddu has brought Kamalam and Radhai from Cholapatti. He will return to Cholapatti for a week and bring Krishnan and Raghavan back for the thirteenth-day ceremony so they needn’t miss school. Vairum and Vani also arrive from Madras, in time to see Visalam’s ashes committed to the river that took her life.

The night they all gather, Sita wonders aloud if their father knows. “Does any of you have the least idea where he is?” She looks around at them, facing blank, weepy looks.

“I ...” Laddu clears his throat inefficiently. “I had sent Vairum Mama a telegram asking him to inform our father. He is the only one of us who might know where he is!” he says defensively in response to several incredulous looks. “And Vairum Mama is honourable. He would have done it.”

Saradha looks at Sita with concern and says, “But maybe he didn’t.”

Kamalam bites her lip. “Or couldn’t find him.”

But the next night, when Laddu discreetly asks Vairum, Vairum assures him, “Oh, yes, I certainly did. Sent him a telegram.” Vairum smiles, softly sardonic, not without pity. “I didn’t offer to pay for his bus fare, though. He might have thought that an insult.”

“Where is he now?” Laddu asks, a bit too eagerly.

“He is very near, as it happens.” Vairum wears an even, appraising expression. “Thiruchi. Barely fifty miles.”

Laddu looks small and stammering. “And do you know he got it?”

“The telegram was sent to his home.” Vairum rises and stretches. “Presumably, he got it.” He looks around at Goli’s children, who look back at him, with Sivakami’s features, and Goli’s, and Thangam’s, and Vairum’s own, and the looks of ancestors none of them will ever know.

“Good night,” he bids them, and leaves for the chattram where he is lodged.

They are silent a while in this room they have been given, off the main hall. Everyone else is asleep. Then Sita explodes.

“Our father is a good-for-nothing! A good-for-nothing! Look at how he left us, vulnerable to Vairum Mama’s insults and jibes all these years!”

Her siblings shush her, telling her in whispers to sit, as she marches around the room, incensed.

“Vairum Mama was right! All of his slights against our father were absolutely right and I’m going to tell him so. Visalam was...” Here she gulps a little against a sob. “Visalam was a harmless soul and Appa couldn’t even come to bid her farewell. I know what you all think of me.” Saradha clucks in protest, but Sita doesn’t appear to hear, and none of her other siblings say anything. “But even I can see what an innocent soul she was. I wish he weren’t my father.”

Her siblings are surprised. None of them has felt compelled to make a declaration of the sort Sita makes the next day, to Vairum.

“Vairum Mama, I was critical of you all these years, trying to be loyal to my father. I regret that now,” she says, her voice trembling but clear. “You have done more than he ever has or will for our welfare. Thank you,” she declares, breaking down a little.