The Toss of a Lemon (8 page)

Muchami is out back playing horsie, letting wee Thangam ride around on his back while Sivakami peers at the map, rotating it, biting her lip. Muchami is slight but must have considerable strength to give a horsie-ride to the world’s heaviest child, Hanumarathnam notes with satisfaction, just as the boy collapses in a pile of giggles. He had wanted a young man, someone who would be Sivakami’s legs and back, eyes and hands, throughout her life. But there are dangers, for a ... a ... (he does not let himself think widow). He had to find someone he could trust with his wife, who would be no more than eighteen and left alone in the world.

In the weeks between his son’s birth and his wife’s return, Hanumarathnam had found reasons to casually observe the young people of the servant class at play The rough and tumble of pubescent boys, their teasing and taunting of the girls, the girls’ half-hearted escape attempts... and he noticed a young man who didn’t participate in the taunting of the girls. He observed this young man more keenly and saw the youth was not gentle or shy. In Hanumarathnam’s opinion, this boy didn’t refrain from teasing out of an inordinate respect for females. He refrained because girls did not interest him. Hanumarathnam saw Muchami’s eyes gleam when the boys alone ran off to play kabbadi in the dust. He saw him tackling the tallest and best-looking boys and sitting on them a little longer than necessary; when he saw this, he guessed that this boy would not outgrow his boredom with girls.

Discreet inquiries revealed the boy to be called Muchami, to be the only son in a family of three children and to have a widowed mother. By way of one of the couples who work for him, Hanumarathnam summoned the widow to his house and explained his interest in employing her son. He met with the boy, who impressed him as sharp. The pact was secured, conditional on performance, the widow was eternally grateful and Muchami was instructed to show up a week or so after Hanumarathnam brought his wife from Samanthibakkam.

After the morning meal, the whole household naps, Hanumarathnam a little apart from Sivakami and the children in the main hall, Muchami on the narrow, sheltered platform that extends from the back of the house into the courtyard.

Around tiffin time, an agent comes to the house to purchase paddy. Muchami asks permission to handle the transaction on his own. Hanumarathnam complies, then watches with increasing admiration as Muchami bullies and shames and achieves a much better price for the paddy than Hanumarathnam ever has.

After the muttering and defeated middleman leaves, Muchami asks Hanumarathnam, “Ayya, why do you deal with that particular agent with your paddy?”

“I... because I have always dealt with him.”

“He’s been cheating you.”

“I know...”

“But less than the others would have.”

“I know.” Hanumarathnam wonders why he sounds defensive, given that he feels amused. “That’s why I always go to him.”

“Well, you can see he will cheat far less now. Today I did not permit any cheating at all, though I will, with your permission, Ayya, allow him to cheat now and again, just to keep him interested.” Hanumarathnam nods as Muchami continues, “The balance will still be more profitable for you than it has been.”

After this it’s market hour. Muchami will assume this not from Hanumarathnam, but from one of the other servants, a diligent man, but one for whom age is becoming an obstacle. Hanumarathnam takes Muchami to the market himself, to spare the old man the journey and to evaluate Muchami’s bargaining ability.

With the sellers of dry goods, vegetables, fruits and kerosene, Muchami uses much the same bullying and shaming techniques that were so effective with the rice agent. Hanumarathnam observes at a distance, thinking it would have made good business sense to hire such a savvy assistant much earlier. Muchami will pay for himself in no time.

Hanumarathnam has only occasionally gone to market—when he was young, and a servant was sick or perhaps away at a wedding. Every time, he wanted to bully exactly the way Muchami is doing now, especially when dealing with those merchants known to be particularly bad cheats. His caste consciousness would not permit him: such behaviour seems ungracious from Brahmins. It provokes jokes about mercenary priests, and Hanumarathnam is particularly sensitive owing to his role as village healer. If he were perceived as grasping, the villagers would still come to him for medicine, but his relationship to them would be altered by a lessening of confidence in the purity of his goodwill.

So he never tried, though sometimes he intervened on someone else’s behalf, because merchants cheat poor people even more than they cheat the rich and Brahmins. Hanumarathnam reflects momentarily that a poor person working for a middle-class household has the greatest bargaining advantages—the power to purchase in quantity and the knowledge and status of the street.

When they return from the market, Hanumarathnam comes in by the back courtyard, washes his feet, then proceeds to the veranda to sit on a jute-strung daybed and contemplate the Hindu newspaper.

Muchami enters the courtyard behind him and empties the bag of vegetables on the platform behind the kitchen. Sivakami squats to do the sorting. This was a ritual, enacted by her mother and various servants, that she had observed daily as a girl and looked forward to assuming: the mistress criticizes the servant’s choices, goes into shock at the expense, has all the fun of market banter without leaving the house.

But when, in her first week as mistress of her own house, Sivakami launched some imaginative criticisms of the produce, the old servant barely glanced at her. He just put the change down on a corner of the platform and wandered away, leaving her mumbling to fade into silence. The day following she asked him to stay while she inspected the goods, and he complied but shrugged at bruises and rot, claimed not to remember prices and was altogether no fun.

Now, unexpectedly, Muchami addresses her. “Beans are better than most. It’s not been a good season for beans. Don’t know how he gets such good beans, considering he’s such a coward.”

Sivakami is too surprised to respond. She has been silent with him till now, resenting him, hating what he represents. Now, she’s uncomfortably aware of her reluctance to risk a remark that might cause him to stop talking. He doesn’t seem to mind her silence and continues, “His wife and son are always ganging up with her sister and the sister’s husband. They ridicule him until he cries and runs away to sleep. They all live with him—he’s too scared to stop them. Must spend all his time finding these great beans.”

Sivakami, though still trying to be unfriendly, can’t help asking, “Why is he so scared?”

“Because he’s a coward, like I said. Look at these eggplants. I know they’re not gorgeous, but they were a free gift owing to my acquaintance with the seller. He used to beat up on me because I was a friend of his younger brother. Now he won’t try it because I’m working for you, Amma. Just cut off the bad parts, there’ll still be lots. Where do you want the lentils?”

He bounces the sack of lentils off one knee and then the other while waiting for her answer. She hurries to fetch the canister, and he puts away the other dry goods and the kerosene.

That night, Hanumarathnam talks to her about their newest employee. He is satisfied that he has chosen well this caretaker for his wife and children but is also aware that he may be giving this boy some power. He likes the idea that he has the power to give it and thinks Muchami will still know his place.

In those early weeks, Hanumarathnam continues the work of checking on crop yields and collecting the rent while Muchami tags along. The servant has adopted Hanumarathnam’s posture and stance, the slight stoop, the outward turn of the knees. He has found himself a walking stick, which he uses to dredge plantain leaves from irrigation tracts. He leans on it as he watches Hanumarathnam leaning on his own stick and talking to the peasant cultivators. Muchami’s dhotis become whiter, his hair smoother, and he adopts Brahmin turns of phrase and pronunciations, adding curlicues to a manner of speech that had already sounded a bit forced among his social equivalents.

Many of the tenants, along with Muchami’s uncles and mother, find his affectations silly, but the few who are impressed give him more than enough reason to continue. He begins monitoring and collecting on his own. Though he is tougher than Hanumarathnam, he never bullies the tenants. In the market, people expect to be bullied, but bullying peasant farmers in front of their homes is gauche. His family and close friends call him the landlord’s goonda, but they are only teasing. Muchami knows this and doesn’t get defensive; instead he swaggers around and pretends to be a real goonda. He knows he is successful.

Sivakami, too, senses that Muchami hopes to be something more than most among his class, and wonders if they might be of help along that path. She also finds herself, daily, looking more and more forward to his reports from his rounds, less and less inclined to hide her amusement. She has a few friends, Brahmin matrons like herself, who drop by from time to time, but they seem to tell the same few stories, about saris, deaths and slights ad nauseam. These things do interest her, in the candyfloss way of pulp novels. It is wholesome gossip, because everyone does it, and because it comes with judgments: proper versus improper, decent versus indecent. In contrast, Muchami’s tales are meaty and illicit. He tells her everything about people she knows and those she will never meet. He is more respectful when speaking about Brahmins but makes no attempt to censor himself—in fact, he is encouraged by Sivakami’s attention into increasingly outrageous mimicry.

One day a few weeks after he starts work for them, Muchami is sorting through the produce in the back courtyard by the well, entertaining Sivakami, who sits on the platform behind the kitchen with the baby in her lap, by commenting on the vegetables in the voice of their preferred kerosene merchant. The kerosene seller has a strange condition : his voice, every few phrases, shoots up briefly and involuntarily into a falsetto. Muchami maintains a deadpan monologue on the vegetables, not breaking rhythm at all for the falsetto interludes. “Okra aren’t bad, though he kept slipping these little-little rotten ones in among the good. I called him on it, picked them out and said, ‘Who’re you trying to fool?’”

Sivakami, after a brief attempt to restrain her giggles, breaks down. Muchami starts adding effeminate prancing to the high-pitched bits, still with no break in work or words, until Sivakami is nearly collapsing with laughter.

Glancing up, she sees Hanumarathnam has come to the pantry entrance, attracted by her laughter. He looks amused and curious, but Muchami stops when he notices his employer and stands with his head bowed. Sivakami, too, stops laughing, and Hanumarathnam says, “What? Why so solemn as soon as I show up?” They smile at him shyly and he withdraws with affectionate exasperation, but Sivakami feels sick with anger now, at herself, and even more, at Hanumarathnam. Muchami tries to resume clowning a little but quickly sees that she is no longer in the mood.

How dare my husband trick me into accepting this?
Sivakami stomps inside and puts the baby in the cloth hammock where he sleeps, rocking it silently and a little too hard, until the baby’s wails jolt her into slowing down and beginning a lullaby. She takes a deep breath.
Here I am, acting normal, after my husband has said he is going to die
.

WEEKS ACCELERATE INTO MONTHS. Sivakami and Hanumarathnam’s son has come to be called Vairum, “diamond,” in contrast to Thangam’s gold. One of Hanumarathnam’s sisters created the nickname, when, holding the baby, she said with a little shiver, “Ooh—look at how his eyes glitter—so cold!” She stopped, suddenly aware of how Sivakami might take this. An elder sister-in-law didn’t really need to be concerned with Sivakami’s feelings, but she didn’t want to offend her little brother. “Your little diamond!” she added in a shrill disclaimer, and Sivakami accepted the suggestion, choosing to pretend the entire comment had been in goodwill and good taste. (The sister-in-law had not yet discovered ice, or Vairum might have been named for that chill substance.)

Vairum is a very different child from his elder sister. Unlike Thangam, he craves attention. He complains loudly until he is picked up and comforted. Fortunately, also unlike Thangam, he is the normal weight of a skinny Indian baby, and so not a great burden to his tiny mother. While Vairum’s stare contains unmistakable longing, no one but Sivakami and Thangam is tempted to carry and cuddle the boy with the pinched features and cold, dark eyes. Tempted least of all is his father. Hanumarathnam keeps very occupied with healing and agriculture, his studies, his training of Sivakami and Muchami. He always has a small joke and a cuddle for his daughter, but nothing for his son. Sivakami holds Vairum tight whenever she can, covering him with kisses and words of adoration. Where Thangam, at six months, nursed six times daily with perfect regularity, Vairum demands the breast capriciously like the little king he is and should be. Sivakami nearly always complies, stopping what she is doing to take him into the room under the stairs, holding him in her lap as he idly sucks and fiddles with her thirumangalyam, the wedding pendants that otherwise are dropped out of sight in her blouse.