The Toss of a Lemon (78 page)

Everyone’s eyes are on that foot, which is followed by a thick silver anklet, then by the wide red-orange border of a Kanchipuram silk sari, then by the sari’s chartreuse ground—the colours of ripe mangoes in a tree. Bharati emerges as Janaki shrinks. She smiles, requesting cups of the buttermilk for her entourage—the palanquin was followed by two manservants and two maids. As they’re drinking, Bharati asks Janaki, “Sowkyumaa? Are you well?” It’s not an intimate greeting, and Bharati does not sound familiar, nor challenging, though she must have stopped the palanquin because she saw her old school friend. She does sound interested, though, which is more than is expected from a stranger. She glances at Janaki’s belly and her husband.

“I’m well,” Janaki replies.

Baskaran looks at Janaki and then asks Bharati, as his wife should have done, “Are you well?”

“I’m well, yes.” Bharati inclines her head to Baskaran, then turns back to Janaki to inform her, “I am a devotee of Goddess Meenakshi.”

“Of course,” Janaki says mechanically.

How is Bharati living now? She must have done well for herself—the palanquin, servants, jewellery.

“You might recall, Janaki,” Bharati remarks conversationally, “that my grandmother is from Madurai. She brought me back.” Bharati smiles, as though Janaki knows how grandmothers can be.

“How is your mother?” Janaki blurts.

“My mother is well.” Bharati cocks her head slightly as if trying to understand what Janaki is saying.

Baskaran is looking at them as though they’re speaking another language, very like Tamil.

The two women stand looking at each other for a moment, then Bharati refuses the cup of buttermilk held out to her by one of the elder children.

“And how is Vani Mami?” she asks.

“She is well,” Janaki replies, starting to feel a bit scared. Didn’t Bharati used to call Vani “Amma,” the non-Brahmin honorific? “Mami” sounds funny, coming from her.

“You both are friends?” Baskaran smiles broadly. “From Cholapatti?”

The women smile narrowly. “We were at school together,” Janaki tells him.

“We had the same music master,” says Bharati, almost simultaneously.

Janaki doesn’t know what Bharati is doing but thinks there cannot be a bridge between them now. Bharati refuses the cup of buttermilk again.

“I have a ten o’clock puja,” she says crisply.

“Come home some time!” Baskaran tells her, heartily sincere and more than a little puzzled.

“I’ll go and come,” she says, and this time it sounds just as anyone might say it: goodbye.

As she folds herself back into the palanquin, Janaki tamps a surge of affection. She wishes she could have told Bharati she thinks of her every time she plays the veena, that she could have asked her how her own music is coming. But she doesn’t really want to know any of the other details of her half-sister’s life.

“Not Brahmin?” Baskaran confirms.

“No,” Janaki shakes her head.

“She has excellent diction,” he observes with a hint of condescension. “Striking.”

Janaki busies herself with a ladle.

Ten days later, Baskaran escorts her back again to her grandmother’s house. They are embroiled in their first real fight and are silent for much of the journey, except when they argue. Baskaran has insisted to her that he will book a labour and delivery nurse to attend her delivery. “I will feel much safer if you are in the hands of someone with some medical know-how, and not prey to these village superstitions. Your grandmother will still be nearby,” he had told her.

A nurse?
Janaki feels indignant at his presumption, but not so much as she would if she had any intention of actually letting a nurse deliver her baby.

Baskaran repeats all his instructions to her when he takes his leave. “Okay, so: you know how you’ll know, right? When it’s time, you’ll feel contractions, a kind of cramping. Send for the nurse immediately. Day or night.”

Could this be the fiftieth time Janaki has heard this speech? How does he keep his phrasing and inflections so consistent? She respectfully refrains from mouthing along with him.

“I’ve paid her handsomely to be on call,” Baskaran remonstrates. “And she knows she’ll get the rest when she has done a good job.”

No good woman contradicts her husband, so Janaki is silent. She knows Baskaran has talked with Muchami and Gayatri about this. He doesn’t want to seem disrespectful, and so has said nothing to Sivakami. But as soon as he leaves, Janaki tells Muchami, “Listen. No nurse. I want Amma’s kai raasi to deliver my child.”

Muchami doesn’t respond. He is embarrassed at being involved in this disagreement: now that Janaki has said “kai raasi,” it would be bad luck to call the nurse.

GAYATRI, WHO STILL COMES DAILY to take her coffee with Sivakami, asks Janaki to come and visit with her at home. Janaki is feeling a little lonely and isolated, despite the company of her siblings, and welcomes the chance to gossip.

She updates Gayatri on the running of the charity and describes the partition plans. The older woman concurs on their impropriety. The Madurai Meenakshi festival comes up in the course of their meandering palavers. Janaki doesn’t even realize how much she has been thinking of her old friend until she starts talking about her.

She describes the encounter at the chattram and asks Gayatri if she knows about the family.

“But it’s incredible, Janaki, that you would ask me about them!” says Gayatri. “I had forgotten that you and the elder daughter were in school together.”

“Why,” Janaki probes, impassive but for a trace of a pout, “is it so incredible?”

Gayatri clears her throat. “Until a few months ago, I only knew what everyone knows: they’re a devadasi family. I think there are, or were, at least four children from C. R. Balachandran. And I know there were a couple of other children from a couple of other fathers.”

Gayatri glances away at that last statement and Janaki, aware of her own dull anger, tells her quietly, “Rumours connect my father with that family.”

Gayatri’s head snaps up. “Who told you that?”

“Isn’t it a mark of prestige to patronize a devadasi?” Janaki doesn’t see the need to reveal her source and is more interested in getting to the heart of the matter.

“It depends what you mean by patronize.” Gayatri smiles kindly. “But let me tell you what happened. I heard about it from my husband. He, if you can believe it, went to their house.”

There is a debate in the legislature at present, Gayatri tells her, as to whether the devadasi system should be outlawed. Janaki recalls that vaguely—maybe Rukmini Arundale said something when they were in Madras?

Minister, whose contacts in the Kulithalai area are very much trusted, had been requested to escort an investigatory delegation to Bharati’s family home. The committee member most strongly opposed to the courtesan system opened the conversation by asking whether they wouldn’t rather find more respectable ways of living. Bharati’s mother had refused to talk to this committee or any individual on it. But Bharati’s grandmother replied, “I respect myself,” with dignity that surprised them all: the non-Brahmins, who wanted the system abolished, and the Brahmins, who were against declaring it illegal. “How dare you imply that you are attacking immorality,” the old lady had thundered at them, “when all you’re doing is attacking the carriers of culture in your shrivelled world?”

“My husband said she might have been beautiful once,” Gayatri said, “but so peevish! Though my husband did say she had excellent diction.”

Janaki is silent.

“‘Do you think that Brahmin girls will ever conquer the expressive arts?’ the old lady asked my husband. ‘We were not even permitted to cook. Do you think you can domesticate the spirit of culture? Brahmin women suffer, oh, I know they suffer. But they don’t suffer the hardships that temper steel into artistry. They suffer the hardships that make women insipid. You want their husbands neither to take pleasure in them nor to take pleasure elsewhere. As though we are p ... p ... prostitutes!’”

Gayatri, who had quite entered into the spirit of the old woman’s speech, jumps as Janaki snaps, “Well, I am utterly in favour of outlawing them. Nobody’s going to make art illegal—they want to make it respectable. What’s wrong with that? The devadasis’ options will increase. They won’t have to prey on men, breaking up families and living without any kind of security, resorting to blackmail and who knows what?”

Gayatri makes a motion to her to lower her voice—her daughters-in-law and grandchildren are about.

Janaki whispers loudly, “How do they explain an artist like Vani Mami, anyway?”

“You have a good point, Janaki,” Gayatri responds delicately. “But I can’t blame the women entirely. Especially lately. The system has been breaking down. They don’t have the protections they once had. You asked whether it is not a mark of prestige to support a devadasi. It was—when it was done right. But more and more now, these women are being forced to behave like common prostitutes, which is degrading. Men don’t live up to their responsibilities like they used to.”

This statement clearly applies to Goli in any situation.

“May I tell you what has happened in their family?” Gayatri asks.

The old lady apparently considered her life, after she was plucked from Madurai like a jasmine at dawn, to have been a parade of disappointments. The essential tragedy, she said, was that none of her daughters was very beautiful or talented. She had chosen the middle girl, Bharati’s mother, as the most promising. She convinced her own sponsor to fund an education for the girl like the one she herself had had. But, she grumbled, there was not a sufficient appreciation of devadasis in Kulithalai.

“So many men who, somewhere else, in another time, would have had the ambition to patronize a dasi. Here they don’t even think of it. Okay, this,” she said, pointing the heel of her hand at Bharati’s mother, “would not have attracted the wealthiest and most powerful, but she should never have been left scrambling!” Then, as Bharati bloomed into beauty with adolescence, the old woman grew bitter. “This is the girl I should have had,” she shouted at the committee, pointing at her granddaughter.

Janaki startles. “Bharati was there? But I thought she was living in Madurai.”

“I’ll get to that.” Gayatri holds up a hand and continues quoting Bharati’s grandmother. “‘This girl should have been born a hundred years ago, in the shadow of a famous temple’s towering
gopurams
!’ she said. ‘Poets would have immortalized her. Corpulent Brahmins with diamond ear studs and betel-stuffed cheeks should have been kept awake at night scheming on means to finance her maintenance. Kings would have declared themselves unworthy!’”

Bharati’s dancing and music masters had not even lived in. The committee was made to understand this had been a sore point for her grandmother. This prompted them to ask: many a live-in master is brutish and demands distasteful favours, which the family must permit because how else can they give the child the training she needs? This surely was the type of suffering Bharati’s grandmother had talked about: did any of her teachers ever commit improprieties upon her young person?

The old woman was appalled that the committee would ask such a question, and as good as kicked them out of her house for their rudeness.

“So that was that, but I wanted to know what was happening with the girl—what is her name again?”

“Bharati,” Janaki mumbles.

“Yes—Bharati,” Gayatri repeats, a little quiet as though she just remembered Janaki’s stake in this story. “A beautiful girl.”

Janaki doesn’t reply.

“I asked Muchami.” Gayatri lowers her voice confidentially. “Bharati came of age around the same time as you. When she finished school, her mother let her be taken to Madurai. Their relatives there arranged a performance to try to attract a patron for her. She attracted a man in his forties. He is a Brahmin but not a man of good reputation. He had dropped two previous devadasis after he tired of them, and he ...” Gayatri makes the signal for drinking, her thumb pointing at her mouth. “His family still has money, but I imagine Bharati must be concerned that he may well drop her, too. She came back here for an abortion. I don’t know if it was the first.”

Gayatri stops and they both are silent.

Janaki wants to remain angry but finds she cannot. Her own life seems so simple by comparison.

“Sometimes”—Gayatri looks almost scared to say this—“men are known to patronize more than one woman. Women get diseases...”

“Are you saying this is what my father does?” Janaki asks.

“You opened the topic, Janaki.”

Janaki is too emotional to apologize. “Does... does my grandmother know about the rumours?”

Gayatri looks as though she would like to end the conversation. “I’m sure she doesn’t. As we said, it is no longer the mark of a great family, and never really was, I think, for people like us.”