The Toss of a Lemon (9 page)

On one afternoon, after Vairum finishes nursing, Sivakami is playing with him, lifting him horizontally to blow against his tummy, luxuriating in his baby skin and the rich sound of his giggles. She looks up to see Hanumarathnam, watching through the doorway as though it’s a portal between this life and the next. She holds the baby out to him, exasperated: no matter what is coming, nothing in life is denied to him now. But he takes a step back and she clasps Vairum again to her breast.

She wishes she could talk to Hanumarathnam about the despair and estrangement she sees on his face, but when she tries, she finds she pities him too much. She is grateful she doesn’t have to live with such feelings toward her children; she doesn’t know how she could talk Hanumarathnam into feeling any different. She persuades him a couple of times to hold the child, thinking he can’t help but fall in love if he does so, but Hanumarathnam looks so stiff and helpless that she takes Vairum back. And the little boy’s eyes, so often trained on his father, are full of unreciprocated desire.

Perhaps through some ineffectual cosmic attempt to remedy this injustice, Thangam is as infatuated with her little brother as the rest of the world is with her. She insists on helping her mother bathe the baby; she rocks him, pats him, sings to him, seems oblivious to any child’s existence save his, even while children on the veranda call for her daily.

When Vairum is nearly eleven months old, they shave his hair—it takes three of them, Sivakami, Murthy and Rukmini, to hold him still—and make a pilgrimage to Palani Mountain, where they offer it to the deity. On his first birthday, he is held on Sivakami’s eldest brother’s knee and his ears are pierced. He screams and thrashes so violently that Sivakami wonders if one of the demons who should be placated by these rituals has got the wrong message. Thangam stands close by—she who whimpered as her head was shaved and burbled with silent tears at her own piercing—trying to soothe the baby.

Hanumarathnam, on these days, says nothing. He always turns so as not to have to see the little boy, who watches his father as Thangam watches the baby, and Sivakami watches them all, knowing nothing can compensate for Vairum’s deprivation. None but a father can give a father’s love.

MONTHS SPEED PAST. Hanumarathnam and Sivakami have been married now for almost eight years.

She has been enjoying her new responsibilities. She has known many women who do their families’ accounting and make their financial and strategic decisions. Many wives do these jobs because their husbands are less than competent. The wives’ work is accepted but never acknowledged. She is the first she has known whose husband has trained her at these tasks, shown faith in and approval of her abilities. And with Muchami’s presence already so strong in the fields, her husband’s absence will hardly be noticed out there.

She realizes that she has begun to accept the way he has tricked her into being practical, into living with his death. She hardly recalls the resentment she first had toward Muchami.

And in the night, every night, Hanumarathnam turns to her. They might go through the movements for procreation or pleasure, but on these nights, the fire is fed on fear of death. Sometimes, as Sivakami marches tenderly through the requirements of his siddhic practices, she wonders with each movement, is this the one that will give him long life? She is a Brahmin, she cannot make him into a siddha. She supposes he could become one, if he chose. But then, that would mean renouncing caste, and if he were not a Brahmin, she could not be married to him, so what purpose would that serve?

She often rises after Hanumarathnam’s rough breathing has deepened into post-coital rest. Her sleep now is rare and slight, between her worries and Vairum’s nocturnal wakings. She lights a kerosene lamp and does beadwork by the bad light. Night after sleepless night, contrary to all her mother’s severe warnings, Sivakami finds her sight improves from the exercises. The tiny glass beads dance with the flame, sometimes they seem to her almost to sing, as she sits before the Ramar, working and praying and wondering about the future.

She wonders, if they have more children, another son, maybe things, astrological things, would shift again. But she somehow knows there will be no more children.

She recalls Savitri, that most devoted wife and daughter, whose story is told in the Mahabharata. Savitri had insisted on marrying Satyavan, in spite of all her elders’ objections that he was cursed to die within a year of their marriage. She would not be put off, and when Yama, god of death, came riding his water buffalo to claim Satyavan’s soul, Savitri went after him and, with clever arguments and bulldoggish perseverance, got her husband back.

Sivakami wonders what choice she herself would have made, given these conditions. She admits to herself in the small, bleak hours before morning that, given the choice, despite all she feels for her husband, she would not have chosen to be a widow.

But she was not given the choice. And when the time comes, will she follow Yama’s water buffalo into the netherworld, over rocks and by harsh seas, to reclaim her husband’s soul for his body? She sensibly concludes that all she can do is prepare. Her husband, bless his cursed soul, is doing everything in his power to help her do that. She falls asleep praying for strength.

The years hurtle past them, like rain and parrots, like rice and rose petals.

VAIRUM, NOW TWO AND A HALF, is outside playing under Muchami’s watchful eye. He has grown from a complaining baby into a child who plays alone. He plays energetically and needs many people to populate his games, but since he lacks friends, he uses Muchami for every role. Vairum is fractious, bossy and tiring, but the patient servant generally does whatever the child commands, pretending perfect comprehension of Vairum’s cryptic and sometimes semi-intelligible orders. Muchami is an energetic young man, but Vairum taxes him completely.

Vairum is spoiled. Not just because he’s an only son, though this might have been enough, but because Sivakami pities him. She coddles and cuddles and feeds him extra sweets. He laps it up, going to her many times each day to bury his face in the folds of her sari and thighs.

He has begun to exhaust even Thangam, who continues to love him for reasons of her own. Vairum responds by pinching his sister, pushing her away when she tries to help with his games and then screaming and clinging when she leaves him, once kissing her so violently his tooth breaks her skin. He doesn’t seek her out, though, as if to prove he doesn’t need her the way everyone else does.

In his favour, Vairum is generous to a fault. He never eats treats without first offering others a share, even giving up his own portion if some urchin looks at it with big eyes. He can’t stand for anyone to go without. Even Thangam is never excluded, though she will never take from him. Sometimes, he approaches his father with an offering. Always, his father declines.

It is hard to say whether Vairum is doing this to win friends. If he is, it’s not working: smaller, more timid children are scared of him; larger, bolder children tease him mercilessly; small and large run at him to take whatever delicacy he has on offer, then run away. Vairum cries in a far corner of the house, goes on feeding the opportunistic children and plays with Muchami.

Thangam spends most of her time sitting in the hall or on the veranda. She doesn’t chatter, she doesn’t do handicrafts, she just sits. She is willing and prompt in completing her few chores, and Sivakami is satisfied she will make a good homemaker. If she needs no entertainment, this is an asset.

The little girl has always been quiet, but, since Vairum was born, she has become increasingly so. This could, Sivakami thinks, be owing to Vairum’s demanding nature: Sivakami knows she pays more attention to the boy, but everyone else pays so much attention to Thangam. Neither has Thangam ever shown her parents the passionate affection that Sivakami receives from her son. Once or twice, however, Sivakami thought she saw, mixed in Thangam’s adoring glances at Vairum, some shame, as she herself received from Hanumarathnam the easy fondness he has never been able to bestow on his son.

Most of the neighbourhood considers Thangam’s beauty itself to be a community service. Burnished hair, molten eyes—for Thangam’s sake, many children come to their house. They ask her to come away, to play with them. They touch her golden skin. She smiles a fleeting smile, rebuking, mischievous, skeptical and warm. The children never give up asking and Thangam never goes with them.

The world loves Thangam and does not love Vairum, because Thangam is easy to love and Vairum is not, and people, given the choice, do what is easy.

IT IS THE HOT SEASON. The children of Cholapatti lie moaning, felled by a fever and pox, in rooms all up and down the Brahmin quarter, in huts in the village and fields beyond. Sivakami prays daily to the stone Ramar, guardian of their home, for her children’s safety. She ties extra charms around the children’s necks and wrists. She prays to the goddess Mariamman, who visits houses in the guise of such sickness, by muttering welcomes, because she mustn’t make the goddess angry, and by appeasements, because this goddess is always angry. Despite her precautions, both Thangam and Vairum contract the illness, which has already taken three children in a month.

The children lie in the front room for five days with sweats and chills. Each awakens with nightmares. Thangam will be sleeping and flip suddenly onto her back. Her eyelids will shoot open and she will stare at the ceiling as though facing down her fears, lips troubled but silent. Vairum thrashes and lashes out in his sleep, hits himself and howls. He weeps from bad dreams and must be consoled.

Sivakami wipes their small bodies with warm water. When they are chilly, she covers them. When they sweat, she fans them with sprays of neem branches, kept always near sick babies, because neem gives the goddess Mariamman pleasure and so satisfies her that she feels she may depart. Muchami quietly does what Sivakami does, attending to one child when she tends the other.

Hanumarathnam is behaving very strangely. The village families have come to him for remedies, but he has told them he can do nothing for this sickness. He has never said such a thing before. He even gives his own children a wide berth, though he watches them from a distance. When Sivakami asks him if he is concerned for them, he says no.

One night, as she lies awake listening to their laboured breathing, Sivakami becomes aware that Hanumarathnam, whom she had thought asleep for some time already, is saying something. She quietly asks him to repeat himself, but he continues mumbling. She leans in close, but the phrases are nonsensical to her. She watches him with her dark-sharpened eyes for a while: he is asleep. She rises to take up her beading. She is working six scenes from the child Krishna’s life and is midway through the third.

In the morning, she asks Hanumarathnam if he recalls his dreams of the night before.

“I never dream,” he replies without looking up from his newspaper.

“You were talking in your sleep last night,” she says.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” He is already impatient with the conversation, and she reciprocates, “Why should I?”

He sighs. “Did it frighten you?”

“No.” The subject is dropped, and Sivakami goes about the morning’s chores, mystified and suspicious.

That afternoon, she is attending to the children, praying under her breath continuously. Like all the women in the village whose children are sick, Sivakami has offered a deal to Mariamman, that her children will participate in the village goddess’s annual festival if only she will remove the scourge. It has been five days, without sign of recovery, but Sivakami has faith yet.

Hanumarathnam is napping on the other side of the main hall. Sivakami starts as his lips begin moving and realizes she has been staring at him for a long time. She rises to move closer and in doing so happens to catches a glimpse beyond the open front door.