The Toss of a Lemon (89 page)

Muchami cleans cobwebs and dust from the upstairs room. Presumably, the little boys, after the first day or two, will sleep below, in the hall, or above, on the roof, with their cousins. He’ll have to check whether they have enough bedding for everyone. Janaki, Saradha and Kamalam usually bring their own. He’ll dispatch a letter this afternoon to make sure they do. They probably won’t leave their homes for a couple of days yet.

He squats, his head in his hand. Why can’t he believe, as Sivakami obviously does, that Vairum has had a change of heart?

In the two years when Mari was taking her treatments, he had had the chance to observe Vairum more closely than he has in the years since, but he has seen nothing to make him believe Vairum has changed his thinking. He came to Cholapatti as recently as a couple of months ago, and was as cold to Sivakami as ever. In all these years, Muchami has never told her more than he felt she needed to know, and he never talks to her of her son: not of the things Vairum says, against caste, against her; not of his own unspoken responses. Muchami has endured his treatment of Sivakami for her sake, but his anger on her behalf is bright and ready.

JANAKI HAS THE SONG GOING THROUGH HER HEAD—the theme from Saraswati, the summer’s big hit movie, starring Bharati, music by Vani. Gopalan’s nephew was singing it as they waited on the train platform this morning; she heard someone humming it as he passed by her on the way to the lavatory at the end of the car.

Yesterday morning she had clipped two more articles to add to her stack of six about the movie. She has nearly a hundred articles about Bharati, collected over the years, clipped and pressed in books, like blooms from a path not taken. Both of yesterday’s repeated the now well-known story of how Bharati grew up listening to “Sri Vani” play, sitting in the mango tree behind Sivakami’s house. The media circulated and recirculated romanticized images of the future star as a child, sitting on a sturdy branch, ankles crossed, eyes closed and hands miming at playing her own veena in time to the notes emanating from the forbidden household, until dusk, or dark, or until a servant maid fetched her firmly home.

Her co-star, an actor rumoured to have political aspirations, was quoted in one of yesterday’s articles.

“This unforgivable and humiliating segregation is the tragic fact even in today’s village Brahmin quarter, all over Tamil Nadu. Sri Vani and her husband, Sri Vairum, are among the very few upper-caste persons willing to welcome their own non-Brahmin neighbours into their homes. How fortunate for all of us that they welcomed Bharati, that little girl hidden like some unspoken shame in the woods behind the house where Sri Vairum himself grew up! Would that the rest of Tamil Nadu’s upper-caste bigots could cast aside their false race pride as Sri Vairum and Sri Vani have done! We must make it clear they have no choice.”

No choice, no choice ... The words sing in Janaki’s ears with the rocking of the train, filling her with anger and disgust at politicians and actors—all the same, in her mind.
The articles have actually downgraded her caste background, compared with when they first started writing about hers!
Fomenting discontent. It’s practically fashionable to be lower-caste these days, she sniffed, mentally. No understanding of the village—of the mutual dependence and respect.
Look at Muchami! He has had everything he could want—more than most Brahmins! Would he have had the chance to learn Sanskrit in that actor’s Tamil Nadu? Brahmins are the servants of society. Why is all of India out to get us?

Greed, she thinks, nothing more than that. She lifts an arm around her daughter, reading a novel on the seat beside her, pinches her cheek. “Always reading,” she whispers. “College girl, college girl.”

Thangajothi doesn’t look up but snuggles into her side. Amarnath and Sundar sit on a newspaper on the train floor, playing jacks. Janaki counts the baggage on the rack above them and below their bench. A dozen pieces, same as when they left Pandiyoor. All is in its place and soon they will arrive in Cholapatti, where the fragmented world becomes briefly, yearly, whole again. She sighs and feels her ire dissipating, grudgingly soothed by anticipation.

Kamalam comes to fetch Sivakami. “Amma! Janaki Akka’s here!”

Sivakami, slicing bitter gourd as she squats by a blackened, bubbling rice pot, folds the blade down into its block and, pushing herself to standing, sets it on a high shelf, out of the reach of toddlers. She tries to catch her breath against the pain flexing through her lower back and right leg. While sitting, she can almost believe she is forty again, but this pain plagues her whenever she tries to stand, walk or lie down, so much so that she has been tempted, for a couple of years now, to give up those activities.

Kamalam makes anxious, sympathetic sounds as she waits for Sivakami to recover, but as soon as Sivakami is able, she impatiently shoos Kamalam along to greet her sister. She rejects Kamalam’s hand, held out to help, out of pride, not because she’s madi: she will have to take another bath today because she intends on hugging Janaki and the children.

Thangajothi feels the gossamer folds of Sivakami’s sari flutter against her face, so different from the stiff, coloured silks and cotton blends that her mother wears. Sivakami’s sari could be woven from spider webs, she thinks as her great-grandmother embraces her, seeing her hand through the pallu and inhaling Sivakami’s soft-sour scent of rice and age.

She watches her mother’s familiar transformation as Janaki inquires aggressively about everyone’s health and whereabouts. Thangajothi has seen this every summer of her life but only recently begun to understand it: here, Janaki sheds the deferential diplomacy of the daughter-in-law and gets bossy. She’s the second-eldest sister now, and a child of this house.

Thangajothi, feeling shy, makes similar but politer inquiries, as she has been trained to do. Kamalam arrived, some days earlier, with her three children. Visalam’s first daughter is pregnant and has come here for her delivery, though she will be attended by a nurse, and no one will complain or even look askance. Saradha will come from Thiruchi any day, bringing Raghavan, who is living with her as he finishes college at St. Joseph’s. Krishnan is teaching at a small college in Salem and lives there with Radhai and her family. They are also expected. And Laddu never left Cholapatti; he had finally married in 1953, and Vairum helped him to buy the house next door when Murthy died, leaving no heirs. His wife and children spend nearly as much time in Sivakami’s house as in their own, and Muchami plays with those children as he did with Thangam’s, though he is too old now to take them all the way back to his own village every afternoon.

Within days, Thangajothi knows, the house will hum and throb. She is more excited than usual: Shyama will come, at some point, for a week or so—her favourite cousin. He had left Pandiyoor at the start of the last school year, sponsored by Baskaran to study in Thiruchi. Infuriated that a boy so obviously bright was doing so poorly at his studies, Baskaran had sent him to stay with Janaki’s sister Saradha, to attend the same high school as her sons for tenth standard—a crucial year, if one were to go further. Shyama, as though he had had something to prove, had excelled in his new school, and Baskaran had rewarded him with a summer holiday in Cholapatti. He will stay with Gayatri, his relative. Thangajothi had missed him terribly, despite his brief visits home. She had been hoping he might already be here.

But Sivakami is excited for another reason. “Vairum is bringing the children,” she tells Janaki, whose expression changes, as Thangajothi watches, from happiness to circumspection. “The boys will receive their poonals here. Did you hear, Janaki? He is bringing Vani and the children, to spend time with you all!”

Even as Sivakami leans toward Janaki, her lined face lit with excitement, her voice quavering a little, Janaki catches sight of Muchami, listening from the garden door, his expression suggestive of pessimism and pain. When he notices Janaki watching him, he smiles at her and ducks away. Janaki might have been able to believe that Vairum had finally decided to stop punishing his children and his mother unfairly by keeping them apart, had she not seen Muchami. Though she has never articulated it, she is accustomed to seeing Muchami share her grandmother’s feelings. Today, she sees her own feelings mirrored in her old friend’s face: doubts about Vairum’s motivations and anger over her grandmother’s long years of suffering.

Now, in charge of preparations for the poonal ceremony until Saradha arrives, she finds she can’t fully enjoy herself. Vairum was apparently too caught up in city life to have yet granted his sons the holy thread. She wonders how he will justify putting his sons through this most Brahmin of transformations, given his political stances. Will he say he is doing it because he can, back on the Brahmin quarter where he was humiliated and uncasted by his brother-in-law? Will he say he believes in education of any kind, and that his sons need to know their identity even if they must critique it?

Regardless, Janaki sees it as an opportunity for a real celebration of Brahmin values—just what the community needs about now—and tries to throw herself into the work with renewed enthusiasm.

On a morning two days after their arrival, Thangajothi pokes her head into the vestibule and calls out, “Gayatri Mami! It’s Thangajothi.” She holds a P. G. Wodehouse novel, which she had borrowed the previous afternoon from Minister’s library. She enters the dim cool of the main hall, in the middle of which Minister lies on a four-poster bed. Gayatri lumbers from the rear of the house, and hands a stainless steel saucer with some snacks to Thangajothi.

“Yes, child, here. Sit.” She looks a little nervously at her husband, who is so thin as to look like a long wrinkle in the woven bedsheets.

Minister says nothing as Thangajothi obediently squats against one of the pillars.

“Shyama came last night,” Gayatri shares conversationally.

Thangajothi stands again. “He’s here? Upstairs?”

“Of course. All you kids—can’t stay away from the books, huh?” Gayatri sounds disgruntled.

Thangajothi thinks she must be lonely: none of their sons live here any more. One by one, they had all got jobs elsewhere. Yesterday, Thangajothi had overheard Gayatri telling Janaki how her sons in Madras had been asking their parents to join them there, and how Minister refused.

Thangajothi feels bad—she likes Gayatri, but the main reason she comes to their house is for the books. Now she’s feeling worse, because all she wants to do is bound up the stairs to see Shyama.

“The time!” Minister cries from among the bedclothes, and Thangajothi, Gayatri and the nurse, who is squatting in a corner, all jump. “What is the time, ma?”

“Eleven o’clock,” Gayatri responds, looking at the floor. “Go and come,” she says to Thangajothi, waving her away. “Take your tiffin here, with Shyama, this afternoon.”

That morning, a day after all of Thangam’s children have assembled in Cholapatti, Vairum and Vani arrive. It has seemed, to Sivakami, an interminable wait. She is so proud as she comes to the door to meet them. She makes no effort to conceal her happiness, or herself. This is the
new way,
she thinks, a little giddy as she watches them get out of their shiny black automobile, and then backs into the house to admit them.
I,
too, can be modern, she thinks, though she’s still too shy to meet the neighbours’ eyes.

In the dim hall, which smells of cool brick, camphor and holy ash from the many who have performed morning prayers that day, Vani’s sons clutch at her sari as she falls to do namaskaram for Sivakami. Vairum gestures toward Sivakami’s feet and his head, and says to his sons, “This is my mother.”

Sivakami advances a few steps, reaching toward the children as Vani plucks the boys off of her hips. Muchami, standing at the garden door, turns away from what he sees, what Sivakami can’t and doesn’t want to see: Vairum is not smiling and still has not said a word to her.

The boys receive kisses from Sivakami, stiff with terror as though she is a wraith. The aunts and cousins flood forward to engulf them in a warm tide, and Sivakami smiles, brittle and joyous.

Holding her paavaadai up with the hand clutching the book, bracing herself with her other hand against the wall of the stairwell, Thangajothi climbs to the second level. She crosses a room full of recliners and coffee tables whose random placement confirms their long disuse. She has often lingered in this room, searching out Minister’s face in the many framed photos: large groups of sombre men, faces dark between white caps and kurtas, apart from the occasional white man in a suit, or Indian man in a uniform or princely regalia. The photos are annotated with occasions and purposes, sometimes with the names of all the men present, written in English.

This time, though, she goes purposefully to the original library. Shyama’s not in there, so she goes through to the walkway. As she traverses it, she hears through the skylight, which gives onto the main hall, Minister’s voice. “The time, ma! Tell me the time.”