The Toss of a Lemon (84 page)

Sivakami tries to speak reassuringly, says how glad she is to have visited the shrine, and how invigorating the climb was, and asking which way is Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter and can they see it from up here? They make their way slowly down again, stopping to see whatever Sivakami senses Saradha wants to show her.

She gives in and stays two days in Thiruchi; then it’s Saturday and a half-day at school. That evening, Krishnan escorts her to Cholapatti. Muchami fetches a locksmith to open the padlock, and Sivakami, at last, is home.

THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER HER ARRIVAL are spent cleaning the house and updating the accounts. Muchami waits until the second morning before asking, “And Amma, why did you return?”

She has nearly convinced herself that her banishment was her own fault: if she had gone about things differently, introduced the topic more gently, more indirectly, perhaps if she had talked to Vani first, she might have helped. As it was, she just made Vairum defensive.

Still, she knows that if she tells Muchami what happened, Vairum will come off looking bad.

“What could I do there?” She smiles at him. “They didn’t need me. They needed a doctor.” She tries to make the unfamiliar word sound natural. It’s the first time she has told Muchami a lie; they have always colluded in such matters. “They’re so modern! I just couldn’t keep up.”

“I would have come to fetch you,” he says. “He only needed to send word.”

She realizes Muchami feels guilty.

“He should have asked me to come for you if he couldn’t bring you hisself,” he emphasizes.

“Himself. I told him not to.” It’s getting easier to lie: the first is always the hardest, she has learned. “I left quickly so he would not insist. It was not difficult.”

She falters at the last. Muchami is not fooled, even if he doesn’t know exactly what happened.

“You should have called for me, Amma.” He can know nothing of the feelings of a mother for her son, but he has dedicated his life to maintaining the propriety of this household and, out of consideration for her feelings, faults her for its dereliction. “You should have let me do my duty.”

Sivakami dutifully writes Vairum and Vani to inform them of her safe arrival. Months pass without a response and without an appearance from Vairum, who has come every month or two since moving to Madras, to check on his lands and his business interests locally. Muchami walks the fields, as he has always done, though it takes him nearly two weeks now to visit all of the properties, so much have their holdings grown. He ensures that rent is paid promptly and fully, and Sivakami records the amounts in the latest ledger. Once, there is a minor dispute, but he resolves it handily without having to ask Vairum for his intervention, though he invokes the landlord in the mild threats he uses to bring the tenant in line.

Sivakami and Saradha had conferred in Thiruchi and decided that Raghavan, Krishnan and Radhai will all remain there, despite Sivakami’s return. The boys have settled into school and are performing relatively well, Krishnan better than his younger brother, who has little interest or patience for study despite his evident talent. It would not do to disrupt them again, much less to return them to the inferior school in Kulithalai. Though Radhai is no longer in school, what would she do alone in Cholapatti? Saradha can use her help—Radhai is an able cook and tutors the younger children, who love her. Though she has been more or less tamed, she retains enough tomboy mischief to keep them entertained. The other reason Sivakami recommends this arrangement, the reason she doesn’t tell Saradha, is that she hopes Vairum and Vani may call her back.

Laddu moves back in with Sivakami, but he is away at work for as much as twelve hours a day. After years of efficiently co-managing the hubbub of children, grandchildren, neighbours and friends, Sivakami and Muchami find themselves, when they have finished their daily work, with a lot of time on their hands. Sivakami mentions to Gayatri that her copy of the Kamba-Ramayanam got eaten by worms in Madras. “The damp, Gayatri!” she told her friend. “Bugs I’ve never seen before!” The next day, Gayatri brought her the gift of a new copy. She never asks why Sivakami returned.

Sivakami daily spends an hour or two reading from the Ramayana, usually aloud to Muchami. Often, they pass some time in the afternoon playing palanguzhi or Chinese checkers. It’s just as well they don’t need help from Mari, because her health has continued to deteriorate.

In October, Deepavali, the festival of lights, comes and goes without word from Vairum. She had written to ask if he and Vani might visit, but received no more response to this letter than to any of the others she has written, four since her arrival home. She observes the festival with nothing but a small puja at home since Laddu has gone to celebrate with the crowd in Thiruchi.

She feels similarly dispirited when the days of Pongal arrive in January. Without enthusiasm, she makes big pots of sweet and savoury pongal, the sticky rice and lentil dish that is the emblem of the holiday, enough for all their tenant-labourers. Laddu stays home to receive gifts from the tenants, pumpkins and sheaves of rice or millet, which they leave in the front hall before going around to the shed for their meal. Muchami has cleaned it out for them, and Sivakami has drawn a large, festive kolam on the floor. He and Mari will serve.

It would be a modest but proper celebration, were it not for Mari’s strange behaviour. She has been complaining of odd ills for years, and on this day, the first in months when she has been required to come to Sivakami’s house, she is more of a liability than a help. She spills several plates of food, saying she can’t see the labourers’ banana leaves on the floor, or can’t see the floor. Then, when Muchami tries to tell her to rest, she loses her temper, yelling at him in front of the gathering. It is highly awkward, but she will not retreat on Muchami’s orders. She stands defiantly in the shed until she hears Sivakami’s loudly whispered command from the courtyard. She gives Mari a cup of warm milk and, when the feast is done, Muchami escorts her home.

A few days after Pongal, Sivakami hears shoes being kicked off in the vestibule and hurries for the door, trying to outpace a moth of nervousness meandering around her. It is shortly after noon, and she and Muchami had been resting, she in the pantry, he out in the courtyard. She hurriedly puts some snacks on a plate with a tumbler of water, and runs to greet Vairum, saying, “There you are! I didn’t know you were coming, and haven’t prepared, but I must make a special tiffin.
Uppuma
and
samiya payasam,
yes?”

Without acknowledging her, he calls out, “Muchami! Muchami!” Passing his mother, he goes to the floor desk. Without sitting, he takes the ledger from it and begins looking over the accounts. Muchami arrives at the doorway to the main hall from the garden. “Yes, here,” he says, panting slightly.

“This Chellasamy’s rent. Why are there brackets around it?” Vairum asks, frowning at the ledger.

Muchami looks past Vairum at Sivakami, and back at Vairum. Vairum looks at him and points at the entry.

“Uh,” Muchami begins, “if I’m not mistaken, that was because his brother paid on his behalf, to repay a debt to Chellasamy, but the paddy was not of the same grade. Is that right, Amma?”

Sivakami, who records income and expenditures according to his reports, confirms, “That’s right.”

“All right. The rest looks good. Shall we go out?” Vairum asks Muchami. He snaps the ledger shut, stows it in the floor desk, puts his shoes back on at the front door and strides away. Muchami looks at Sivakami and, wiping his forehead with his shoulder towel, dashes to catch up with Vairum.

Sivakami stands alone in the main hall for a long time before she takes the plate of snacks back into the kitchen. She makes the tiffin, but Vairum doesn’t return that day. Muchami, when he returns, eats the tiffin and takes leftovers home for Mari. Sivakami eats nothing for several days. He asks her no questions and says almost nothing. Laddu, perhaps, never knows what has transpired.

She doesn’t feel angry, nor even, really, confused, but just empty of effort and of fear. Now she grows accustomed to that emptiness jutting against the emptiness of the house, which vaults around her menacingly at night, silently shouting reminders of all she does not have.

Vairum visits Cholapatti in March, again coming and leaving without a word for his mother. At the end of April, the school holidays arrive, and with them, her grandchildren and their children, for their summer visit. The house brightens with noise and activity.

So when next Vairum comes, she doesn’t hear him enter, she just hears the main hall go quiet. When she goes to the pantry doorway to see why, all her granddaughters are looking at the front entrance. They turn to one another busily, as if to comment on what they have seen, but then catch sight of Sivakami and fall silent again.

Sivakami knows Vairum must have come and gone, perhaps acknowledging them, though her granddaughters saw that he failed to say a word to his mother. She turns from them and goes back to the kitchen. She doesn’t want to know what they will say to one another and doesn’t want them to think they can ask her questions or offer her comfort. This has nothing to do with them. She’s not even sure what it has to do with her.

When Janaki sees how Vairum treats their grandmother, she wants even more badly to stay on. She had already been dreading the return to Pandiyoor: her brothers- and sisters-in-law are planning to move into their own homes in July, and the tension in their home, over the division of possessions and other niceties of the break, was already mounting before she left. But Baskaran’s letters to her have been full of the pain this is causing his parents, as well as his longing for Janaki’s return, and she can’t prolong her stay.

She can see how their presence here must be cheering Sivakami. Saradha had told Laddu and her sisters of Sivakami’s bizarre appearance at their home, leaving them all to speculate on the circumstances. Their convergence in Cholapatti revived the painful topic and the way Vairum ignored Sivakami sealed their consensus that there had been a violent break of some kind. They have heard nothing more of a baby from their aunt and uncle, and indeed, have heard little at all from them in the last year.

Inevitably, Baskaran comes to escort Janaki home. Thangajothi, their daughter, has had a marvellous time with her cousins but is thrilled to see her father. He and Janaki dote on her: a precocious two-year-old, fair, a little too skinny, with jet-black hair that has grown out in curls since it was shaved and sacrificed to Palani mountain a month before her first birthday.

On the train, Baskaran briefs Janaki while Thangajothi sleeps. The new houses are ready to be occupied, but Mr. Kandasamy’s modest proposal also included a division of the inheritance. The brothers will walk with their shares. The brothers have become accustomed to the idea of being household heads and are behaving with due combativeness. Shortly after Janaki’s return, Senior Mami decides all dowry items and furniture belong to the marital household; her sons overrule her by saying there are now two more marital households. She is so insulted she weeps, terrifying rubbery sounds, and gets a nosebleed that lasts, off and on, for days.

There is much wrangling over how the land is to be divided, which pieces of land are the more productive, and whether this is owing to the tenant farmer, the crop or the location.

In the final moments, Vasantha and Swarna let loose on each other. At meals, they accuse each other of acts and thoughts that had been secrets between them. They try to take back gifts, even from each other’s children. Things not given, they steal.

Janaki pities her father-in-law, as now the brothers accuse him and Baskaran of plotting to disinherit them and throw them out. Senior Mami has a mild heart attack, and her husband a sympathetic attack a week later.

It is as though they are living through a scourge, and when it is over, what lingers? Bad feelings that may persist through generations, Janaki thinks miserably, huddling with her husband and child at night, being exceedingly solicitous toward her parents-in-law by day. How can people not see—Vasantha, Swarna, Vairum—that even a family that fights is better than a broken one? Families belong under a single roof. She resolves that, after they move, she will make an extra effort to be friendly with them, and with Vairum. She must work, in every way possible, against estrangements.

It is mid-August when finally the two couples move into their own homes, the week India gains independence and Pakistan splits off: a country born, a country split, parturition and partition. Northern corridors run with blood—families abandon homes, families abandon families.

Janaki, who has no interest in politics and has lost track of the news, is felled by a fever that keeps her in bed, shivering, for three days. Baskaran goes in search of Palani veeboothi, which she takes in pinches and makes him and Thangajothi smear on their tongues and foreheads as a preventative until she is better.