The Toss of a Lemon (11 page)

A little shrine is built beside the Ramar, to house Hanumarathnam’s soul. Thangam, her hair loose, like Sivakami’s, to show their grief, learns to make rice balls, which are offered daily at the tiny shrine. This is one reason everyone needs a daughter.

Sivakami tells her children that their father has gone away, and that the little shrine is like a playhouse where his soul lives, and the rice balls are like pretend food for him. Thangam seems to like this idea. Over the thirteen days of mourning, brushing her long, unbound hair out of her face, she brings extra decorations for the shrine, some tiny play dishes and her own picture of baby Krishna. Vairum takes little interest.

Now that her husband is truly gone, Sivakami feels an odd eagerness for the ceremonies that will brand her a widow. A woman whose husband dies before her is, in some cosmic, karmic way, responsible for his death, and must be contained. The best way to do this is to make her unattractive: no vermilion dot to draw attention to the eyes, no turmeric to rub on the skin for brightness, no incense to suffuse the hair, no jasmine bunches to ornament it. No hair to suffuse, but that comes later.

Still wearing the bright colours she now loathes, she is paraded down the main street to the Kaveri, escorted by her father, her eldest brother and Vairum. On the riverbank, in a ceremony as old as men and women, her brother tears Sivakami’s blouse at the back, and she is made to remove it. She unties the saffron thread of the thirumangalyam and drops it into the pot of milk her son holds for her. She feels her bile rise and viscerally understands why her wedding pendants’ hot anger might need to be cooled.

She will never see those gold medals of wifehood again. All her bright silk saris are packed with neem and other bitter leaves against moths. Thangam will receive them someday, and the wedding gold melted down and transformed. No one wants to waste gold.

Sivakami accepts the two white cotton saris that will be her only garments and her badge.

She watches Vairum as she goes through each stage of her transformation : see,
I am
to blame, it is
my fault
—
everyone
thinks so. She offers her yoked shoulders for this burden: see, my son, it wasn’t you.

On an appointed night, Sivakami waits in the courtyard while the rest of the house falls asleep. She sits and looks into the dark, the cotton of the new sari still stiff. It chafes against her bare and tender breasts but will soften with many washings. She combs out her hair with her fingers. Curly and unruly, it tumbles past her waist. Not as long as some women‘s, but quite long, considering how wilful it is. She wishes her hands felt like her husband’s, stroking her hair, but one’s own touch can never have that delicious strangeness.

She has a feeling suddenly of being very, very large, twenty times larger than the average woman. Her hands, when she holds them up, look small and far away. The night is cool on her face and she feels both drowsy and unpleasantly alert.

The courtyard door opens. She jumps up and takes the kerosene lamp from the blackened wall niche. She holds it out to see: the one she waits for has come.

She motions to another doorway; beyond it is the garden. The barber follows her there.

He has brought a small wooden stool. She seats herself. The moon is scant days from its darkest phase so he needs the lamp with its flame leaping large and greasy.

He is experienced and efficient and has kept dozens of such appointments, and before he begins, he says, “Amma. I’m sorry.”

As he lifts the first hank from her neck, Sivakami’s deprived body thrills to the sensation, and the shame of this thrill makes her glad that he is cutting it off. Then he begins shearing her head, leaving only a quarter-inch pelt to protect her delicate scalp.

It is complete. She has finished the crossing from sumangali, married woman, to
aamangali,
widow.

The barber cleans up and departs with the dignity of those who do the work the world despises. The locks he gathered will be sold as hairpieces. Sivakami bolts the courtyard and garden doors, then douses herself with buckets of cold water. Barbers are untouchables and she has been temporarily reduced to his status. The water makes her an untouchable of another kind. From now on, she will be madi, maintain a state of preternatural purity from dark to dark, so that no one may touch her after her pre-sunrise bath until the sun sets. And she will be as invisible as any untouchable in the Brahmin quarter, going to her river bath in pre-dawn dark, returning before light so as to spare her neighbours the sight of a widow. Such a bad omen.

She drops the bucket over and over into the blue-black iris of the well, still feeling the barber’s fingers in her phantom hair. Her eyes are terribly dry.

As she finishes, she hears a sound from the sheltered corner of the courtyard where Muchami sleeps when he stays the night. She holds the lamp up. Muchami is turned to the wall, weeping. This is not the first time she has seen him thus since Hanumarathnam died. A twinge of affection shakes her head. She almost reaches out to touch him: her head has been touched by a non-Brahmin man, why should she not touch the head of one? Is there a separation any longer between Muchami and her?

Yes, there is. Muchami still has his middle-caste status, while she, now, is so pure as to be an outcaste. They never touch, not even accidentally, for the duration of their separate and inseparable lives. The barber is, she thinks with revulsion, the only man permitted now to touch her regularly: he will return, every few months, to ensure her continued ugliness.

She goes to lie beside her children. Vairum stirs and reaches for her thirumangalyam. He only occasionally still nurses, but playing with her pendants is a remnant of babyhood, and he reaches for them whenever he feels insecure. Frustrated at not finding them, he bats at her neck. Sivakami shushes him and presses him close, easing him back into sleep.

She keeps her breathing shallow so as not to disturb him, her chin lightly touching the top of his silky head, as the night slides and blurs against tears that will not free themselves.

The crowds eventually drizzle away. Sivakami’s brothers depart, after receiving Sivakami’s pledge that she will move back to their village, Samanthibakkam, to their father’s house, where they can help her manage her affairs. A woman alone is a target, they say, and she agrees. The shrine is dismantled and Sivakami tells her children that their father has sent a telegram saying that he has reached the stars and must continue travelling. He is studying the heavens and doesn’t know when his researches will be completed, when he’ll be allowed to return home. Even if the gods let him go, she tells them, we won’t recognize him because he no longer has his body. The children appear doubtful but ask no questions. They look hurt, and Sivakami tells them Hanumarathnam didn’t undertake this journey by choice, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

Sivakami’s brothers return for her three days later, weeks sooner than they had agreed. Their mother has been ruined by Sivakami’s widow-making, and is on her deathbed. At the time of the marriage, her husband had told her what Hanumarathnam had said and implied that worrying about his horoscope would be an indication of her ignorance. She felt that if Sivakami had better timed her son’s birth, none of this would have come to pass. As Sivakami’s mother, she, too, was to blame. Who knew what karmic drama was being replayed thus to punish them? For clearly they were being punished.

In her lucid periods, she tells her sons not to permit Sivakami to visit. She doesn’t want to see her daughter in white, she says, with shaven scalp, no ornament or decoration save for a streak of holy ash on her forehead. But in her sleep she cries out over and over for Sivakami, her youngest, her only girl.

Sivakami craves her mother, but she is ashamed to be seen in widow’s whites; she feels guilty for the tension in her brothers’ faces. She has failed; her family did not thrive. But she wants to kneel and put her head in her mother’s lap, just as her own little boy does in hers, to feel her mother’s hand stroking her head. She is only eighteen years old.

Thangam and Vairum go next door to stay with Annam and Vicchu, and Sivakami’s brothers escort her to Samanthibakkam for a visit.

When Sivakami arrives, her mother is awake. Shrunken and wasted, she lies on a cot while her eldest daughter-in-law, Kamu, reads to her and the youngest, Ecchu, presses her feet. At Sivakami’s appearance, her mother shuts her eyes and rolls onto her side, clutching her knees to her stomach and moaning, “Oh my daughter, oh my youngest, oh my dearest, youngest child, my golden girl.”

Behind her, Sivakami’s brothers whisper, “You see, that’s what she does. Come, bathe and eat.” Sivakami obeys, but she knows her mother is watching her. Sivakami’s father stands in the puja room. He counts off mantras on his beads, and every five rounds, he makes a mark in a book. Sivakami sees him on her left, then sees herself in the cracked shaving glass outside the kitchen on her right. She inherited the stiffness of her shoulders from him.

In the next few days, Sivakami and her mother have two or three private audiences. During one, her mother extracts a promise, then falls asleep. Sivakami slips her moist hand into her mother’s dry one, though she should be observing madi, and somehow falls asleep herself, her shaven head half-resting on her mother’s hip, the crumpled white cotton of her sari shrouding the rich maroon of her mother’s. Her face, at rest, is as pouty, self-absorbed and carefree as that of the adolescent she might, in another life, have still been. The next day, her mother dies.

The same funeral procedures that they so recently observed for her husband now follow for the mother: new clothes, a pyre, a little shrine like a dollhouse. Sivakami makes the rice balls and recalls her daughter’s small hands and the care Thangam applied to this task. She works to apply herself as her little girl did. And now, Sivakami cries. She weeps at the shrine and at night and alone in corners, expecting and receiving little comfort from her brothers and their wives, who are sensitive enough to leave her alone, nor from her father, who has his own burdens. She cries for her mother in this house where she is a child.

After nearly three weeks at her father’s house, though, she must return to Cholapatti and her children, to pack up their lives.

Back in Cholapatti, she and Muchami decide that, after she and the children have moved, he will periodically collect the paddy percentages from the tenants. He will take his own share and those of the two remaining old servant couples. He will then sell the balance, tie the cash in a cloth and toss it through one of the high windows into the front room. The house, thoroughly padlocked, will function as a giant safe, and every few months, Sivakami will return to count the income and put it in the real safe, which sits in the northwest corner of the main hall.

Annam, Hanumarathnam’s aunt, will set out the daily offering for the monkeys, which tradition Sivakami believes she inherited from her late mother-in-law, yet another expression of reverence for Hanuman, Rama’s monkey devotee. Since the house will be locked, that daily offering will have to replace Sivakami’s daily pujas for the Ramar.

Murthy is still grieving, so dramatically that Sivakami would resent it if he weren’t so sincere. “He was my brother,” she hears him sighing whenever she goes to talk to Annam or Rukmini. “Ah”—she sees him pinch the bridge of his nose and sniff loudly—“but not even he could dispute what was in the stars.” Annam and Rukmini smile consolingly at Sivakami, almost as if in apology, but she is mute.

Muchami is bearing up bravely. He avoids meeting Sivakami’s eyes because he thinks she looks like tragedy. He has had his own head shaved to a half-inch too. He has worn only white since coming into their service, so he cannot adopt white garments in mourning, but he robes himself in a look of bereavement.

Vairum now is insatiable in his need for attention. At night, Sivakami holds him. He has stopped looking for her thirumangalyam but instead plays with her index and middle finger, obsessively and rhythmically twirling them through his own until he falls asleep. During the day, though, from sunrise to sunset, he is not supposed to touch her. These are the new rules. When Vairum comes to her for the comfort of her lap, she must back away from him, offering explanations he doesn’t accept. Finally, he gets angry and slaps out at her knee or her hand, and once, her head. This is not mere violence, it is sabotage : she must bathe again and wash her sari. From time to time, she gives in and permits him the lap, since she will have to bathe anyhow. This sometimes happens twice in a day, so that her saris haven’t time to dry. Vairum gets damp, sitting in her lap and holding onto her; they both catch cold.

The day before their departure from Cholapatti, Sivakami has just finished her penultimate puja for the Ramar, asking the stalwart gods to guard their home in her absence. Her needs at her brothers’ house will be few, and she intends to return to Cholapatti every four or six months to look after the business. She is taking only a single trunk—no pots, no furniture, no jewels. She has only the two white saris, one of which she will wear, and the children’s clothes hardly fill one-third of the trunk; they have many clothes, but they are small children. She is also taking a book, the Kamba-Ramayanam, the Tamil telling of that epic story, the only book she reads.

She fetches the keys to the safe. This gesture, too, is enveloped in nostalgia. As she lifts the loose brick between the doors to the garden, revealing the keys beneath, she permits herself to wallow in memory, as in sun-warmed mud: her first week as a bride, newly come of age, learning to be mistress of her own house; her husband’s delight at showing her the Dindigul safe. Dindigul: a brand to rely on.

There are four iron keys, only two of which are key-shaped. Another is a rounded stick, like a hairpin, and the fourth is flat, a lever. Hanumarathnam had deposited the bundle of keys in her palm and pointed to the safe without a word, challenging her to figure it out. She had poked and tickled and pounded the safe, neither wholly haphazard nor exactly methodical, but determined. Finally, Hanumarathnam had wrested the keys back from her, near helpless with laughter, and shown her the way: