But it isn’t Visalakshi: it’s some other young woman with the same figure, same round cheeks and frizzy hair, stopping at a respectful distance to ask, “Mami is all right? Does she need some assistance?”
“No, no, child,” Sivakami replies, and then realizes she does in fact. “I am ... I need to find, Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter.”
“Hmm.”
The young woman makes a great show of thinking. She calls her family over and they all think. Clearly none of them knows. Finally, the eldest man in the group speaks on their behalf.
“Well, you must go to Thiruchi proper. All right? Cross that bridge, then you will see it.”
Sivakami intended on going that way regardless, so she is spared the embarrassment of not taking their advice. She bids them a decorous farewell.
Rested and cooled, but still as deeply shaken by her failure as her success in not dying, she follows the little path back to the road and starts following it toward the next bridge. She recites Kamban’s Ramayana to herself—she knows it so well that she hardly needs the book, but it, too, had become a talisman—the only book she has ever read. Each verse falls from her lips like a curtain against the entry of thought.
As she reaches the end, she spots a Brahmin walking in the same direction. She hurries to overtake him and accosts him by asking, “To go to Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter?”
He turns: it’s the priest from the Vishnu temple at the end of the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter! A vicious gossip. She recalls his pious, lascivious voice, like a bletted papaya.
But no, it’s just some other paunchy, middle-aged Brahmin. He informs her officiously that Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter is close to Malai Kottai, and points, with confidence approaching boredom, back the way she has just come. He clearly assumes she is a cook or some equivalent. She must be quite black, she thinks, after all these hours in the sun. For her part, she suspects he has just performed a funeral on Saradha’s street, at extortionate prices.
He at least knows where she needs to go, however. She returns to the bridge and walks back.
Every hundred paces, it seems, she sees some familiar old acquaintance from Cholapatti. Is that babbling and limping old man not the same one Dharnakarna the witch cast her spell over three years ago? He is lewd and foul-mouthed and she has forbidden her granddaughters’ kids to get within twenty paces of him, but now he seems like a fixture of home and she wishes she had food to give him.
It’s not him. That hiccuping laugh that turns her head is not Gayatri’s. She asks directions again. She follows a bend in the road. That hoot and holler is not Raghavan’s. Raghavan, such a robust and cheerful boy. Just the occasional grey shadow in those golden eyes, only to be expected. She has stopped to seek him out in a cricket ground, though she knows by now that the sturdy boy running at her out of the dust is not him, and the lanky silhouette following is not Krishnan.
But then why are they embracing her?
It is they.
Sivakami doesn’t respond to their questions. Each boy takes one of her arms, and they walk across the field to the street. The sun is showing its colours in the west, but Sivakami can make out her eldest granddaughter’s compact shape, leaning on a front wall, chatting with her mother-in-law and a neighbour.
Saradha shrieks. “Amma! Amma! What are you doing? Where are you? What... what did you boys do?” She looks ready to hit them as they guide Sivakami inside.
“We found her,” Krishnan says defensively. “We were playing, Raghavan looked over, and she was standing by the edge of the field.”
“What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!” Saradha is in a panic. “Amma, say something, Amma, why don’t you say anything? Raghavan, go get water for Amma.”
Saradha’s in-laws graciously retire to other parts of the house. Her husband is still at work. Sivakami opens her mouth. She holds it open a second, then shuts it again. Saradha pours water into Sivakami’s jug, and Sivakami moistens her mouth and throat, and after some moments, asks, “Where is the washroom? I have not had my bath today.”
“Sit for some more time, Amma.” But Sivakami asks again for the bathroom. As she locks the door, Saradha asks, “Amma, when did you last eat?”
“Yesterday,” she says into the dank and welcome solitude—out of the world’s eye at last. “Don’t worry, child. Let me have my bath and then I will make my rice.”
“Yes, Amma. I will... I will prepare vegetables for you to cook.”
“Good girl.”
Saradha’s sons, Raghavan and Krishnan’s coevals, had been out playing cricket with their uncles but not recognized their great-grandmother so readily. They followed them home, quiet and incurious, though it is obvious that something bad has happened. Raghavan and Krishnan also ask no questions but show concern. When Radhai returns from visiting at a friend’s house, she is panicked, but her elder sister silences her with a finger.
When Sivakami is nearly finished eating, Saradha finally makes her first sally.
“Amma, when is Vani Mami expecting?” Sivakami doesn’t answer. Saradha tries one more remark. “She must be very big.”
“She is no bigger than she was a year ago at this time,” Sivakami informs her.
“Ah.” Saradha bites her lip.
Her kitchen is orderly to the point of excess, Sivakami has noted, with approval and without surprise. Each time she used a spice, Saradha, hovering, returned it to exactly the spot from which it came.
“Amma, why on earth did you leave Madras, Amma?” she asks.
“Because my son told me to go,” Sivakami explains evenly.
“He thought you shouldn’t be waiting around any more.” Saradha nervously adjusts her sari.
Once more, Sivakami doesn’t feel like replying.
“He didn’t send a servant with you?” Saradha whispers sympathetically.
There is a long pause in their conversation.
“But you should have informed us that you were coming!” Saradha throws up her hands and rolls her eyes, as if Sivakami were just too spontaneous.
“I intended to go straight through to Cholapatti without troubling anyone else.” Sivakami finishes her meal. Dribbling water around the spot where her banana leaf lay, so as to ensure no one will step on the polluted spot before she can wipe it, she folds the leaf away from her and carries it back into the courtyard to wash her hands.
“Why did you get down in Thiruchi then instead of going on to Cholapatti?”
“I don’t know what happened. I got confused. And my bundle disappeared, someone took my ticket and money while I was washing my face.”
“Oh, no, Amma.” Saradha lifts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no.”
Sivakami waits for Saradha to stop wailing. She would feel worse if the girl didn’t react like this, but it’s not making her feel much better.
Saradha finally dries her tears and asks, “How did you find your way?”
“How does it matter? I found my way. How is your husband?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“How are your in-laws?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Good.”
“Come,” Saradha says, after a pause, standing with the busy air of the excellent housewife. “Lie down now.”
“Yes.”
Saradha unfurls a straw mat for Sivakami in a corner of the hall as the in-laws return and exchange niceties from a distance.
From the floor, Sivakami tells Saradha, “I want to go to Malai Kottai tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow morning, before I get on the train for Cholapatti. I want to go to the top of Malai Kottai.”
“Aren’t you terribly exhausted, Amma? You must stay longer.”
“No. I want to look on that god’s face in the morning.”
“All right, Amma,” she capitulates, sounding concerned. “Sleep now.”
But Sivakami is already asleep.
At dawn the next morning, Sivakami and Saradha go by cycle rickshaw to the foot of the hill temple. Sivakami wanted to walk but finally capitulates only because Saradha said she herself couldn’t walk three miles to the temple and then climb it. In the rickshaw, Saradha asks if they are retracing the route she took. Sivakami thinks they must be but it looks even less familiar now than it did then, when she thought she knew everyone she passed. Now, with Saradha at her side, she can see the streets’ real strangeness. She might have wondered how she made her way, but it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t. That was the least of her concerns. What will happen when next she sees Vairum? What does he think happened to her after she left—and how can such a son live with himself?
They dismount from the rickshaw at the entrance to a thickly crowded corridor into the temple’s first vestibule, and walk along a cordon of small shops into the oil-lamp-lit, stone-floored room. Voices rebound with the sound of coconuts shattering, thrown hard in a trough, as offerings or thanks, while devotees mill in circles around a wide tree growing out of the floor and into the ceiling. The smells of burning camphor and incense press hard against the smells of sweat, soap and hair oil.
Sivakami bustles straight to the stairs that ascend through the mountain’s centre to its summit, and begins to climb rapidly, one hand on the rough wall to steady her, only one impatient glance back to check that Saradha is following.
Their legs grow painful, then heavy, then numb. Saradha struggles to keep pace. A bat dips into the stairwell from a high cavern in the walls. Sivakami listens to the rhythm of her steps against the stone, the brushing of her hand on the wall, her heart pumping, her breath rasping. She hears it all as though she were a bat, both within herself and high above, both inside the mountain and climbing it. They pass by chambers and niches for worship and rest. She doesn’t stop, not once.
When they come out into the light, they are beside a small cave, with a smooth, level floor, a pillar-framed entrance and walls carved with row upon row of writing. Finally, Sivakami pauses and thinks, as she is meant to here, of kings. Chola kings—did they build this? To guard the city against the marauding Pandians from the south? Was it earlier? The Pallavas? The walls might tell her, but the Tamil is archaic, and though she stands mouthing the syllables, they don’t assemble into meaning.
Still, she moves her eyes along each and every line of the inscription, an exercise not unlike her incessant reading of the Kamba-Ramayanam. She looks at that book because she thinks it important that Brahmins not forget how to read, and for that reason, now, she reads the inscription without understanding any of it and then begins again to climb. She calls out to Saradha, who is leaning against an opposite wall, her eyes still closed but her chest no longer heaving. After one more long flight of stairs, they emerge from the mountain onto smooth, bald rock. Sivakami walks to the edge of the small plateau and beholds the city with the Kaveri River, its reason for being, streaking unconcernedly down its centre.
She sees people below. It is too far down to make out any individual, besides which her eyesight is not what it once was. But Sivakami imagines she sees the kings and armies of olden times, the Pallavas, Pandians, Cholas, Nayaks, battling to gain territory, struggling to keep it. She sees Kannagi and Kovalan, of the Tale
of an Anklet
, passing through the city on their great and terrible journey south to find their fate in the kingdom of a careless monarch. She sees pilgrims, she sees merchants. Seafaring Chinese and African traders; Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, laughing with them. And, arriving from the northeast, she sees herself, small and determined, fighting confusion, indignity and peril, and finding her way, in an unrecorded triumph.
Saradha is sitting beside her, now, enjoying the view. Sivakami thumps her encouragingly on the back and Saradha gives her a watery smile. There is yet one more flight of stairs—to the belvedere.
Saradha has always liked this temple. She always brings visitors and enjoys with them a leisurely ascent, with many stops for exploring the cavernous temple chambers hollowed from the mountain’s centre, savouring a strong flavour of self-righteousness on completing the difficult climb and a pleasing glow of fatigue in the thighs. This insane dash has deprived her of all the en route pleasure, and now the tearing sensation in her lungs and the weakness in her legs are preventing her even from enjoying her spiritual point-scoring. Worse, Sivakami exhibits no consciousness of all this, no sense of how it all should be done. She is not even mouthing about how healthy the climb is, how holistic Hindu worship, how superior every Brahmin devotional act.
Rather, Sivakami is bounding, without a word, for the final staircase to the tiny Ganesha shrine at the top. It is enclosed in a cupola with open frames on all sides. Saradha lets her go.
Sivakami joins the other pilgrims circling the god, one of the primary modes of worship. In the course of her first circumnavigation, though, her courage deserts her. Sadly, she confronts Ganesha.
“Are you still there?” she asks, quaking.
“I am.”
“But I didn’t come.” She looks down, her lip trembling. “I didn’t take the chance when the train... I must have been frightened.”
“Mortals refuse most divine offers.” He sounds sad. And amused. “You’ve done nothing new. It reflects well on you that you were tempted. But so few of you accept our gifts, even ones you have prayed for.”
Ganesha is the god of new beginnings, and she missed her chance to end this life and begin another one, fresh. What other divine offers has she denied?
But now Saradha has reached her, and together they make several more turns around the idol. Sivakami thinks Saradha is acting a bit strange, looking at her nervously. She can understand that her dash and insistence might have been alarming. Saradha has had a shock—seeing her grandmother appear, walking on the street with nothing but a brass jug, as if she were some itinerant person—a siddha, for instance—and not the respectable grandmother she has always known.