The Toss of a Lemon (87 page)

Two police constables fight their way through the crowd with billy sticks now. With Gopalan’s help, they carry Baskaran inside, his nose broken, scalp cut, blood crimsoning his kurta. Five minutes later, Gopalan bangs on the door again, this time with an unhurt Shyama in his arms.

Janaki spends a week nursing her husband back to relative health. Fortunately, most of his wounds are superficial. The first time she sees Shyama, she castigates him.

“Can you see now, what kind of sentiments those are? All men are equal! Bah! Why would they hurt someone, then, who never harmed them?”

Shyama doesn’t respond, except to stop coming to their house after school.

Baskaran, once he recovers, speaks to his nephew and persuades him to return, though Janaki cannot help but have another talk with him, in a gentler but still firm tone, and with Thangajothi as well, who she feels is at an impressionable age.

“My own uncle, he is very progressive in his politics. And you know what? He doesn’t even speak to his own mother. Can you imagine?”

She hadn’t wanted to use Vairum as an example, but feels it is urgent to alarm Shyama.

“We must look after one another, care for our own. Like crows, yes. Otherwise, we will no longer know ourselves.”

She has no idea, from Shyama’s expression, what he has taken from her speech, but she can see that her daughter is listening.

Two MORE LETTERS COME FROM MADRAS and this time Janaki is the one to receive them. The first, from Saradha, says that Sita has said, in notes on a slate, that she doesn’t imagine their grandmother knows anything of her illness. She herself did not tell Amma, but wanted to wait until she recovered to go and tell her in person and seek her blessing. The sisters feel they must permit her this, but the next letter, which arrives two months later, from Kamalam, says that Sita will not recover. Evidently, the cancer has spread: Sita is now dying.

Gathered in Madras, the siblings confer.

“I told Amma I was coming here on business,” Laddu confesses, “like I did last time. How can I tell her? She will want to come, and you know Vairum Mama doesn’t want that. It would be a debacle.”

Raghavan alone among them is in favour of bringing Sivakami to Madras. “Think: it could make them reconcile, when Vairum Mama sees her. Some good could come of this.”

His reasoning is not without validity, though all of the others are deeply skeptical. If Vairum felt pity for his mother, wouldn’t he have brought her there himself?

It is Krishnan who suggests, “Why don’t we ask Sitakka what she wants? ”

Sita is now lucid only for brief periods, when the morphine wears off or when it is first taking hold. Just after she receives a dose, but before she drifts off, they put the question to her. She takes up a piece of chalk and scratches dim letters on a slate: “No. It would hurt her too...”

Three days later, she dies. Among her effects, they find a sealed letter to Sivakami, and one to her brothers and sisters, whose contents are roughly the same. When the funeral is concluded, the granddaughters all go with Laddu to Cholapatti, to deliver the first to their grandmother.

Sivakami is instantly alarmed on seeing them. Saradha asks her to sit, and when she has, Laddu gives her the letter.

Dear Amma
...

Sivakami starts to cry, in fear, it seems. Five months have passed since she last saw her grandchildren, all together for the holidays. She puts the letter down, dries her eyes and her palms on her sari and picks it up again.

Sivakami shudders. She considers chastising her grandchildren but feels a cool cloud of reason settling over her: Sita evidently told them not to bring her, and why? She didn’t want to jeopardize the adoption by going against Vairum’s wishes. Sivakami doesn’t think it would have, but now Sita is gone, and Vairum is a father.

She realizes she has been silent a long time and looks at Saradha, Kamalam, Radhai and Janaki, who are holding hands and weeping. Their sorrow must be combined with guilt, for shocking their grandmother, especially after the fact, for not having liked Sita more, perhaps even for questioning Sita’s motives in the adoption: her sons, born to a lower-middle-class household, will be raised in riches. Their house may not have sons for seven generations, Sivakami thinks ruefully, but who knows whether those old rules even hold sway any more.

She goes to take the ritual bath that must follow immediately on news of a relative’s death. She is feeling, also with guilt, another emotion she can’t stop. A son of her son, a son of her son. As if borne on a train, a rush of images fill her mind’s eye: Vairum with two children, coming to show them to her, his snapping black-diamond eyes softened by affection, delight, pride, all the emotions denied to him all these years. Now that her wishes for him have all come true, he will bring the boys and they will all be hers again, the house lit with their laughter.

Some weeks later, Janaki’s daughter Thangajothi, is coming home from school, her cousin Shyama absorbed in a book beside her. Their bullock cart passes a row of huts they pass every day and a woman emerges to scrape a pile of rice out of a pot into the shallow roadside ditch. As the children’s bullock cart continues up the road, Thangajothi sees a crow circle and land, find the rice and start to eat.

He eats alone for a full five minutes before he calls his fellows. “Caw! Caw! Caw!”

A HULLABALOO STARTS UP in the back of the concert hall, and Vairum and Vani’s five-year-old sons, Kartik and Kashyap, jump onto their folding chairs to have a look. As Janaki reaches for them with an angry warning, Sundar and Amarnath clamber up to copy their cousins. When she turns to yell at them, Kartik’s chair folds and he falls through. Janaki pulls the crying child up and sits him on her knee to dust him off, and glances apologetically at Vani, who is onstage tuning her veena, and apparently as oblivious to the commotion in the front row as to that in the back. The other boys have been distracted by the accident, but now Thangajothi is wandering toward the aisle to have a look at who is arriving—some politician or musician they wouldn’t even know, probably—and Janaki orders her back unceremoniously. Celebrities are everywhere through the Madras concert season.

On stage, a man in his twenties, tipped toward a polio-stunted leg, his wavy hair slicked into a kudumi that now looks like a proclamation of adherence to old fashions, squawks through acknowledgements and sycophancies on behalf of the group that sponsors this venue, one of the best attended in the Madras concert season. Eventually, two assistants weighed down by fat floral garlands emerge from stage left. The MC sways and swivels toward Vani and her accompanists to pay them the honours, which they accept and refuse at once—removing the decorations even as these hit their shoulders—in the spirit of this democratic age: “ThankyoupleasenothankyouIamnotworthy.”

Janaki and the children, as special guests of the featured artist, are in the front row. She gets the children settled as the rest of the audience clap, but they get restless again within minutes of Vani beginning the
kirthanai,
and Janaki rearranges them, so that Kartik is on the other side of Thangajothi, and Kashyap between her and Janaki. Sundar is to Janaki’s right and Amarnath on the other side of him-if Janaki can separate her children from their younger cousins, she can trust them to behave, but Vairum and Vani’s boys are difficult under any circumstances and she is already grimly anticipating that she will miss most of the concert. She would have preferred to leave them at home with the help, but she wanted her own children to come and it was difficult to bring them without pointing up the younger boys’ unmanageability.

She’s made her peace with not paying full attention to Vani’s playing; she has had the equivalent of a private concert each of the last few days as Vani has practised at home, and she will stay with Vani and Vairum ten days longer. It’s Janaki’s first time attending the Madras concert season. She intends to relish it. She taps Kartik’s and Kashyap’s knees sternly. Thangajothi stares dreamily at the stage. It’s already breaking Janaki’s heart that her daughter is not musical. Amarnath is the only one of her children with real promise in this department. Baskaran got him a first-class mridangam two years ago, and an excellent tutor. Sundar is made to participate in the lessons and makes no pretense of gaining anything from them, but is not jealous of his brother’s talent. Thangajothi attends veena and vocal lessons with two of her school chums at a neighbour’s. Janaki insists on the lessons but never makes Thangajothi practise at home because she can’t bear to listen.

Intermission. Alone, Janaki might have made some attempt to move into the crowd, see if she recognizes anyone, have a glance at the new fashions, but today, she does no more than herd the children around the back of the concert hall to relieve themselves. Thangajothi refuses, feeling herself too old, at ten, for public urination.

When they are seated again, Vairum arrives, clearing a path through the noise to join Janaki in the front row, creating more noise in his wake as people realize who he is. She’s relieved to be able to turn his sons over to him. He sits one on each knee and whispers to them through the second half. By the end, Kartik is asleep on his shoulder and Kashyap appears to be paying attention to the music. Who could have guessed Vairum, with his passionate tempers and dogmas, would make such a patient and attentive father?

Afterward, they go backstage, a large lean-to with a thatched roof like that over the concert hall. On one of the mats, Vani reclines against a bolster and accepts a tumbler of hot lemon water. Her children bound toward her and Kartik steps in the ill-tempered ghatam player’s coffee. By the time Vairum has finished apologizing, the mat is aswarm with ants attracted to the sugar. Vairum offers the artists lifts home, but other patrons are in wait to pay similar favours and the children have great and inadvertent powers of dissuasion. At home, they alight into that urban dusk Janaki loves, its glow intensified by layers of dust and pollution.

All through the evening, Vani receives gifts with notes from admirers who were present and those who could not attend: boxes from The Grand Sweets, garlands that putrefy in the puja room, statuettes of goddess Saraswati. There are visitors-international businessmen, political petitioners, fawning philanthropists—all of whom are received with efficient grace.

The next morning, the gifts resume. Servants transport them to the appropriate corners of the house even as Janaki listens to Vani’s daily practice and readies herself for a 1 p.m. concert. She will leave the children at home today, and frets over this, though the children are pleased. Thangajothi has books, the boys have each other, meals and snacks appear exactly when they should and none of them can get out—Janaki repeats all this to herself as she rattles in a cycle rickshaw toward the Music Academy, not far at all, she tells herself. A servant can run and fetch her in twenty minutes if anything... nothing will happen, she tells herself until, with relief, she returns home at four. The children have hardly noticed her absence, and she resolves on relaxing when she attends the festival in subsequent days.

She has finished her bath and is combing her hair when she hears yet another visitor arrive. Vairum is not home from work yet; Vani doesn’t entertain. And it is her practice hour, so this person will be snubbed. Janaki has seen this here before—for a visitor in the know, it’s a mark of inclusion not to take offence. She strains with curiosity to hear what will happen, as, her plait coiled at her nape, she hurriedly drags the comb from her part to her ears, once on each side. She dabs vermilion onto her forehead and freezes, her finger in her part, as the visitor’s voice resolves out of the household hum.

It’s not a voice Janaki would have recognized any longer had it not been restored to her through film, given as a gift to all Tamils. She is a provincial treasure, now that there is a Tamil province, that face, that grace, those now-beloved gestures.