The Toss of a Lemon (90 page)

At the end of the corridor, she pushes open the door to another small room. It is, like the library, filled with books—lining the walls, in piles on the floor—mixed in with a jumble of other curiosities: an Eastman Kodak camera like a jack-in-the-box, a non-functioning radio, an empty binoculars case, all home to dust mites, scuttling spiders and an occasional scorpion; a stuffed mongoose with the tail peeling back to show wires and straw; posters of foreign movie stars; a hinge-lidded tin with printing on the side: “500 Scissors Cigarettes,” and another dented tin bearing the puzzling “Peek Freans.” Nothing has moved, from one summer to the next, in the years since Thangajothi first came upon them. Last year, she picked up a flyer for something called the “Self-Respect Ramayana,” because it was exactly like another she had found in the attic room at Sivakami’s house and used as a bookmark, until she lost it. This time, she stuck the flyer under some books on the bookcase, and it was still there when she returned.

Shyama turns from the shelves and indicates the book in her hand with his chin. “What have you got there?” He speaks as though they had just seen each other at breakfast, not as though they had seen each other only twice in the last year. He is taller, his voice suddenly deep, the skin of his temples and neck bubbled with acne. Thangajothi holds him her book out to him, feeling tongue-tied. “Oh,” he says. “Good, no?”

She sneezes from the dust. “Yes, very. What have you got?”

He holds it out to her and turns back to the shelves. Confessions of
a Thug,
by Meadows Taylor. She had seen it and passed it over for no particular reason, and now is mad at herself: she would have liked to have read it first and recommended it to him. She goes back to the main library, Shyama following, and puts the Wodehouse back on the Wodehouse shelf. She picks up Sivakami’s
Vow,
a novel by Kalki Krishnamurthy that she had read the year before. Her mother had read it when it was first serialized, bought the book for Thangajothi, and read it again when Thangajothi finished: a 1,000-plus page historical epic about a dancing girl named Sivakami who wants to marry a king. Thangajothi’s uncle Raghavan had teased his grandmother : a courtesan named Sivakami! Raghavan wasn’t much of a reader, though, and only Janaki, among the sisters, has finished it. She has told Thangajothi that Kalki is one of Vairum’s acquaintances in Madras, that she herself met the great writer on her first visit to the city.

They wander back into the old salon to sit, facing slightly away from one another, reclined in the stillness of Minister’s salon. Only the faraway sounds of Gayatri’s kitchen, and the flip and ruffle of their own pages, break the hush.

The next morning, Shyama enrages Janaki by telling her, when she talks about the big poonal celebration, that he has removed his holy thread. “What do I need a caste marker for? I believe in education for everyone.

“So do we!” Janaki splutters inadequately, and Shyama shrugs.

Sivakami is sitting in the kitchen doorway now, watching them eat, and Thangajothi notices that Muchami, too, has come to squat in one of the doors to the garden. After returning from Cholapatti last summer, Thangajothi had bragged to Shyama of how progressive her great-grandmother’s household is in its treatment of the servants and dared him to find another Brahmin household that so elevated the staff, where servants are permitted to be in view during meals, where they refuse to touch the bedding, where they have actually been given Sanskrit education!

“Elevated!” he had scoffed. “Brahminized, you mean! What’s wrong with their own customs? What’s wrong with Tamil? What’s so polluting about bedsheets, for God’s sake? You’re brainwashed, all of you.”

“All of
us?”
she had shouted, surprising herself out of a tight silence. “What about you? You’re as Brahmin as we are and all you do is parrot your father, anyway.”

As they end their meal now, she watches him observe all the Brahmin conventions—drinking water without touching his mouth to the tumbler, ringing his banana leaf with water against the pollutions of saliva and cooked food—whether out of mere habit or so as not to offend. She wonders if he remembers that conversation.

Having heard that the musical star of
Saraswati
is visiting, dozens of neighbours drop in daily to Sivakami’s house, cluster in the hall, on and around the veranda, clamouring for the famous theme song. Sometimes Vani obliges, rousing a cheer with the opening bars and then a singalong, especially at the chorus. More often, she plays something else, and all those gathered look trapped. When she finishes, they try without success to talk to her about the movie.

When Thangajothi goes out the back, she often sees as many as eight or ten children sitting in the trees beyond the courtyard wall, and others, adults, squatted on the ground. She has heard her mother proclaiming her satisfaction with this turn of events. “Good for them. None but Brahmins ever take an interest in classical music. I think it’s excellent that the lower classes have finally come to it, even if it had to be because of a film.”

Thangajothi winces at her tone. Most of the time, she doesn’t think much of Vani’s playing and it’s not hard to tell that most of those in the living room and out the back don’t know what to make of it either. Her mother does, though, which fact Thangajothi respects.

Janaki sits in the main hall, working a kingfisher in bright threads. She peers too closely at it and wonders if it is obvious that she is sulking and trying to avoid talking to the visitors. She just can’t decide if these people deserve to listen to Vani. This is the Brahmin-quarter majority and they are no fonder of her music than they were ten and twenty years ago. But they should humble themselves here, thinks Janaki, those same neighbours who disgraced Vairum, and who have, resentfully, sold him their properties at inflated prices. The tide has turned a little, though, with the rise of a new generation that knows only of Vairum’s magnanimity. He never stays to visit the Cholapatti Brahmins in their homes, but it seems the chill of estrangement from the quarter may have abated a little. The simple charm of passing time.

Kamalam sits beside her, teaching palanguzhi to her four-year-old twin sons. One of the boys is prone to gestures of theatrical generosity ; the other is conniving; both are disinclined to stick to the rules. (They are in the swell of their personalities, in their purest moment; they are impossible.)

Raghavan had been trying to help Kamalam but got bored and left to see if his older nephews were up for cricket. Janaki had charged her own sons with making sure they were all back for lunch. Krishnan reclines, his head on Radhai’s knee, both sweetly attentive to the music. Laddu’s wife is helping in the kitchen and Laddu will stop in for supper after work.

A horde of hollering boys—with Vairum’s sons nearly, but not yet quite, at the front of the pack—swarm down the stairs, through the hall and out to the street.

Thangajothi comes to sit beside her mother, and without saying anything, slumps into her and opens a book. Janaki sets down her embroidery with a sigh. All the poonal preparations are done; the ceremony is the next morning. She pushes Thangajothi’s book up to see what she is reading: Kalki,
Sivakami’s Vow.
She smiles.

This is as close as we can come now, she thinks, to what it should be like.
Her sentimentality smarts and she enjoys the sting. There are the missing—she feels the loss of Sita’s darkness as much as Visalam’s light—but this is close: Sivakami in the kitchen, Gayatri and Muchami lingering at her sides, Vani playing her veena, Vairum out on business, and the rest of them, Thangam’s children, and her children’s children, looked after, safe and happy.

During the poonal ceremony, Sivakami gets occasional glimpses of Vairum’s sons at the ceremonial fire, as she stands at the kitchen door. Laddu and Vairum, shirtless, in silk dhotis and shoulder cloths, huddle under cloths to pass on to the little boys the prayer for illumination, but as Sivakami’s eyes blur from the smoke, she is seeing another little boy, who had no father, receiving his holy thread, earnestly repeating the syllables an uncle is speaking into his ear—a little boy who was happy then, and proud, inducted into the traditions of his caste, surrounded by his cousins.

She turns away to wipe her eyes and sees Muchami, crouched at the far end of the courtyard, his head in his hands. A mild anger shudders briefly through her, riding a snake of puzzlement: why can’t he feel happy for them? Clearly, Vairum’s participation in this ceremony—of all ceremonies!—shows his desire, his need, to be accepted into the fold of his community, to be together with the family he supported. If not for Vairum’s intelligence, his know-how, where would they be now? Yes, they suffered at times, but for this, to gather like this, prosperous and happy.

How sad for Muchami, she thinks, that he cannot see what I see. No
one ever saw what she did: that tender child.
(A gem, a
coin,
all
elbows
and iron.)
A mother should know.
All is forgiven.

Janaki lays down banana leaves for the third round of feasting, when the family can finally eat. Visitors from up and down the quarter are leaving for their homes with promises to return to hear Vani play that afternoon.

The family members are seating themselves when a car pulls up outside the front door. Vairum looks unsurprised, and Janaki thinks he is smiling slightly. Perhaps some business associate is coming to meet him here? That would be strange; he always has them meet him at his Kulithalai office.

No, it’s a woman. Janaki can’t make her features out against the light, until the visitor steps into the hall’s cheery gloom. A shout fades in from the street. “Bharati! It’s Bharati!”

So it is.

Vairum is striding up to greet Bharati. She holds her palms together. “Namaskaram, Mama. Namaskaram, Mami. Namaskaram.” She offers graceful greetings to Gayatri, who, though gaping, reflexively puts her own palms together and then brings them apart an inch or two, unsure of what to do.

“How are you?” Bharati greets Sivakami’s grandchildren, who stand and stare. She directs a particular greeting at Janaki: “Are you well?”

Janaki waggles her head with fearful rapidity, and Bharati gives her a hard and subtly victorious smile.

“So good you could come home, Bharati.” Vairum is waving her toward the line of banana leaves. “You must take lunch with us.”

“Oh, not necessary, I ...”

“I insist,” he says. “Sit. Sit.”

Kamalam stands stock-still, while Saradha splutters and turns half away from the sight of a devadasi preparing to take food in her grandmother’s home. But it’s not her grandmother’s home, Janaki is reminded as she catches Vairum eye—it’s his. He doesn’t even bother holding her glance. They have no right to challenge him—they are guests in his home. And before this, he gave them everything good. They owe him their lives.

Sivakami sees the visitor arrive—a sophisticated-looking young woman, not one she recalls having met before. She sees Vairum usher her to eat. There is plenty, of course. Saradha comes to fetch another banana leaf but doesn’t appear to hear Sivakami asking who their guest is. Sivakami looks for Muchami, but he has gone. She beckons Gayatri back, signalling, a fist with thumb extended: “Who is she? What’s going on?”

“Bharati, Akka.” Gayatri can barely meet her eye at first, then looks at her with concern. “It’s Bharati, the star of the movie, of
Saraswati.”

Sivakami looks into the main hall. Vairum is watching her.

SARADHA, KAMALAM, JANAKI AND RADHAI ferry out the food, carrying vessels from the kitchen out to the main hall and back, stiff and regular as figures moving in and out of a cuckoo clock. They serve
payasam,
appam, pickles, curries, pacchadis,
applam,
rice, sambar. Somehow, though, they are all present to witness the first fistful of rice Bharati lifts from the leaf to her mouth.

There—there.

The house is defiled.

She lights them with her famous smile. “Delicious. My compliments.”

The four sisters look back, variously, but all unsmiling. A flash-bulb pops—a reporter from
Anantha Viketan
who must somehow have caught wind of the visit. As though his intrusion has broken some film-thin membrane between public and private, the life of the home and the life of the street, neighbours pour back in.

“The devadasi’s daughter,” Gayatri finishes gently, and Sivakami sees a low-caste intruder take rice in her home, in front of her mother-in-law’s Ramar, in front of all the neighbours.

Vairum is still watching Sivakami. Now he smiles.

Muchami has gone around to the garden door. Too late, he sees. He looks toward the kitchen. Sivakami doesn’t look at him. She is seeing for herself now. Muchami hangs his head.

Thangajothi has never met her mother’s father. She knows him only from the wedding photo hung on the pantry wall. She has spent hours looking at that photo; she used to ask to have it taken down for her. She thinks her grandparents the handsomest couple she has ever seen. Since last year, though, she has stopped looking at it so much. It’s true that when these photos are taken, the subjects hardly know each other and often look shy and mildly surprised to find themselves in the same frame. In the photo of her grandparents, though, each looks wholly alone. It has begun to make her sad.