The Toss of a Lemon (15 page)

If only horoscopes were less impartial, Sivakami thinks, feeling sorry for herself, since to feel sorry for her daughter, already, would break her heart. The stars strike without pity. And they collude through generations. She, her husband and Vairum were all victimized by Hanumarathnam’s and Vairum’s star charts, and now, because of Hanumarathnam’s death, Thangam’s stars have shredded her life in advance. The stars’ effects can be altered in combination—look, Thangam’s destiny was reversed by this match. Surely her father, had he lived, would have found a way to turn hers to advantage.

Had he lived. Her brothers had asked her to come here so they could look after her: a woman alone is vulnerable, they said. They are right. Clearly, no one will protect her and her children now that her husband is gone.

As Sivakami predicted (see: she, too, has such powers), the boy’s family comes, sees, consents. The groom, called Goli, is eighteen, handsome, with the sort of creamy complexion customarily called red. (A tinge of aristocracy? Romance and good fortune?) He’s all charm and dash, glib compliments and a restless eye. Sivakami’s sisters-in-law are a-titter.

Sivakami can’t deny that Goli is good-looking, but his behaviour is suspicious. Has he affected this manner or is it natural? He acts like he cannot stay still. He has no obligation to find Thangam’s family interesting, nor even to act as though he does. But is something wrong with him?

Vairum began pouting even before the interloper arrived. He has been scrubbed and oiled and made to sit still, withheld from his cousins and the grubby roaming day that calls to him in sun and dust. He sits obediently in the main hall, a sad, bored expression on his face, determinedly reciting numbers, his lips barely moving.

Thangam serves sweets to her prospective groom. Sivakami observes the pair keenly. She believes she sees the light of attraction between them, like something seen close by the window of a moving train—Goli looks at the girl as she serves; Thangam looks at him as he looks away. Sivakami knows this may be merely wishful: Thangam is only seven, after all, and not a child whose feelings are easy to read. Next Thangam turns to serve Goli’s mother and father, and when they ask the little girl to sing, she treats them to a gentle, indulgent smile and sits to one side, silent and absent-looking. Her aunts hurriedly bring out the little girl’s needlepoint, evidence of her industry and intelligence. She may not speak much, but she is clearly no dolt. The embroidery is primitive; she is still small. Anyway, the handiwork’s beauty cannot compare to the girl’s, and all is forgiven with laughter in the warmth of Thangam’s glow. The families feel themselves on the brink of an agreement, and this makes the gathering even more agreeable.

A little apart, Vairum sits as dourly as only a precocious five-year-old can, keeping one cautious eye cocked on Goli, who continues to bounce about the salon, admiring trinkets and babies and pictures of gods, peering out at the street, tossing out non-witty non sequiturs that set the aunts adrift in gales of giggles nonetheless. No matter how he moves, his clothes hang perfectly on his body. Now he stops in front of Vairum, saying jovially, “Hey, mite!” He ruffles Vairum’s hair, bats his shoulders and generally takes liberties.

“Not the prettiest kid, eh?” Goli addresses the group.

Thangam leaps up, looking alarmed and hurt, as the rest of the gathering burbles and hiccups. Vairum glitters cold scorn. Sivakami bristles, but no one notices her, or Thangam, who eventually sits without speaking but also, now, without smiling.

Throughout this sparkling exchange, Vairum has continued to recite under his breath, “Four hundred and eighty-three times four hundred and eighty-three is twenty-three lakh, three thousand, two hundred eighty-nine. Four hundred and eighty-three times four hundred and eighty-four is twenty-three lakh, three thousand, seven hundred seventy-two. Four hundred and eighty-three times four hundred and eighty-five is twenty-three lakh, four thousand, two hundred fifty-five.”

Now his sister’s intended—for that is what he clearly is, though no one has bothered to explain anything to Vairum—peers at the younger boy’s lips, which immediately still. Goli asks, “What are you saying?”

Vairum turns away, repulsed by Goli’s scent of new rice and lemons—he is nauseated by everything about Goli, by all that everyone else clearly admires. The aunts explain: “Arithmetic. He is doing arithmetic.”

They turn to Goli’s parents, still as brick compared with their son, and elaborate, “He picked it up somewhere; he does it all the time. The children ask him to name two big numbers and add them divide them we don’t know what all, but they seem to find it amusing.”

The fiance likes this. He crows, “O-ho! A smarty-pants we have here, have we? So do some. Go ahead, let’s hear your arithmetic.”

Vairum is lost in his own thoughts, and startles when Goli repeats his request: “Come on, smarty-pants. Show us your tricks. I’ll get you started. What’s seven plus five?”

Vairum fixes a squint on him and says, in order to end the conversation, “Eleven.”

Goli leaps away shuddering and addresses the crowd. “Ugh, those eyes give me the creeps. Don’t they give you all the creeps?” He starts examining the beamwork of the house and asks, “So what’s this wood holding up your house?

Vairum’s had enough. He rises and heads for the door. His aunts admonish him sharply to stay, but he keeps moving. Goli leaps in his way, the chivalrous knight, barely glancing at his quarry. “Stop right there, little man.”

Vairum ducks past him into the vestibule. Goli grabs his arm and yanks him back over the threshold. “I said stop.”

Vairum tries without success to wrest away. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

His elder uncles slide fast from sycophancy to sharp authority: “You do have to listen. He is going to be your brother-in-law.” They slide back to ask the parents with jollity, “We are assuming?”

The in-laws-to-be give hurried assurance, lest anyone change minds. “No, yes, yes, you are quite right, quite right. All very satisfactory. Must get on to details immediately!”

Vairum, under cover of everyone’s etiquette, escapes Goli’s hold and bounds outside. From there he yells, so the whole street can hear, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

Goli poses briefly as though to give chase, but Vairum is gone and the older boy really hasn’t a spark of interest in a sweat-drenched trot through the sun-drenched village. He saunters back into the salon, but there is an unhappy tilt to his mouth. Sivakami sees it as a flag. Might these boys grow to understand each other as men or has she just seen an enmity enter her family?

Her father now rises from his corner. Everyone is mildly surprised, having forgotten he was present. He shuffles out to the veranda, where he will await the next meal to punctuate his existence.

Wedding plans are amicably contracted between the responsible parties. Thangam’s uncles ask for her feelings with questions that cannot be answered, such as “All seems very suitable, doesn’t it, Thangam dear?” and “Weren’t in a mood to sing, were you? Well, it doesn’t seem to have hurt anything.” There is no way to respond, and so Thangam doesn’t. All has gone as God intended and the day waves sunnily ahead.

To his immense credit—though he might have been goaded either by his conscience or by his wife—Sambu negotiates for a dowry to be given in land instead of cash and jewels. He has concerns about Thangam’s future family’s debt status and tries for one more condition : he would like to continue to manage the land and thereby improve it for the couple. To their surprise, the in-laws agree.

Sivakami is somewhat cheered by this small proof of her brother’s concern for Thangam. She feels doubly secure because, of course, he will not manage the land—she will. She trusts her own ability and industry above his.

Despite this discussion, Thangam will still come with a large trousseau. Her sisters-in-law do the shopping. The jewels from the Cholapatti safe will be displayed on the child at the wedding and go with her to her new home. Sivakami hears, even through the cacophony of her feelings about this marriage, the voice in her head making practical arrangements. She doesn’t trust Goli and doesn’t exactly know why, other than that he acts so strangely. But she also feels some relief at having the marriage contracted: Thangam had to marry someone and, who knows, maybe another union would be worse. Maybe this one will turn out all right. Still, she wonders as she bends sleepless over her beading that night,
What is on this Goli’s mind? What is Thangam in for?

NINE MONTHS AFTER THE BETROTHAL, the days of the wedding arrive. Everyone has a role to play, in giving and receiving the gifts of silks and lands and bride. The drama begins with the procession of the bridegroom in the streets, dressed up in parasol and eyeliner and a stiff swirl of silk dhoti. As is customary, he pretends he is off to Benares to complete the Sanskritic studies with which so few modern Brahmin boys bother. Goli’s primary education was interrupted prematurely by his sense of fun. His nickname, which means “marble,” was bestowed by a tutor who left, as all Goli’s tutors did, within a year, after observing that he couldn’t teach a child who spent every session ricocheting off the walls and furniture. Goli liked the moniker and it became one of the few things he retained from his education.

Customarily, when the parade passes the bride’s house, her father intervenes in the chaste young scholar’s journey and persuades him to marry his daughter. This is a Brahmin boy’s big break from the cocoon of youth and scholarship, his chance to transform into a householder who is qualified, and indeed, obliged, to own property and produce a family.

This happy moment of intervention and invitation should have been Hanumarathnam’s. Today, his cousin Murthy, here from Cholapatti along with half a dozen of their other neighbours, fulfills the role, solemnly and with evident excitement, as the closest equivalent of a paternal uncle. Muchami has also come, at Sivakami’s request, ostensibly to help, though everyone knows it is a treat and he is given no real work.

Vairum has been instructed as to each of his obligations and is too bored, by now, even to resist. He sullenly repeats, with flat affect and eyes out to space, each scripted word fed him by the priest, flaring up the sacred fire with ghee. In the process, he accidentally sets Goli’s puffily starched silk dhoti on fire.

Goli streaks straight out back to the courtyard to plunge his leg into a brass basin as Vairum and Thangam make unexpected eye contact, a quavering beam of horror that turns instantly into suppressed laughter. Sivakami, whose widowhood confines her to the courtyard because the wedding is everywhere else, scampers through a gate in the wall, just ahead of the crowd that soon surrounds the smoking groom. In a forgotten garden, behind a scrubby old margosa, Sivakami, too, has a good laugh, and then a good cry, though she cries only from her left eye. Her right stays dry.

If she were not a widow, she and her husband would have escorted Thangam to and from her in-laws’ house for festivals in the years between the wedding and her coming-of-age, at which time she will join her husband for good. She and Hanumarathnam would have got to know Goli and his family at home—though, of course, it would not have been Goli, she reminds herself with shame, since now it is done, and to think of Thangam with anyone else is tantamount to sin. Now her brothers will escort Thangam, and she will have to glean what knowledge she can from their careless, partial reports. Oh, for a spy, someone on her side! A Muchami of the marriage, that’s what she needs, she thinks, as she watches her servant watching the now-resumed festivities. Who will tell her what she needs to know?

Her sisters-in-law approach her, interrupting her thoughts. She has not seen them since Hanumarathnam died, though she dutifully sent them letters, to which they didn’t respond, after settling at her brother’s place.

“Oh, how thrilling to have such a wonderful excuse to come and see you and the children,” the elder sister effervesces. Her jowls, which started forming in her early forties, have a strange rigidity to them now, giving her a formidable look despite her gay tone. Sivakami is cowed.

“Your brothers have done a fine job,” sniffs the second sister primly. “You must count yourself as lucky.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Sivakami replies.

“Now you must let us help you,” trills the elder, and Sivakami is alarmed, since they have never offered any help she wanted before. She has been grateful for their lack of communication since Hanumarathnam died. “Your house is standing empty and you must let us look in on it from time to time. Give us the key, there’s a good girl. We’ll wait here. You don’t seem too busy right now.”

Sivakami looks at her, trying to think quickly. Samanthibakkam is a little closer to Cholapatti than their husbands’ places, and they have never seemed inclined to inconvenience themselves for her before. “I ... thank you. I do manage to go back every three or four months, and...”

“But, my dear, you really shouldn’t, and don’t need to!” says the elder sister, cocking her head impatiently. “We will look after it. Go on, fetch the key and no more objections. You shouldn’t be worrying about this, with everything else on your mind!”

Sivakami looks at the younger sister, who has been silent through the elder’s speeches. She looks nervous and guilty. Sivakami says nothing more but goes to the shelf where she and the children keep their few possessions. Beside her second sari, the children’s clothes and her Kamba-Ramayanam is a small pile of possessions Vairum has accumulated here, things he likes to look at, things he has acquired in trade or intends to give away. Among them is an old key for the Cholapatti house, which she saved for Vairum after the attempted robbery, when she had the locks changed. She’ll have to compensate him, she thinks, as she brings it back to her sisters-in-law.

“For the courtyard door padlock. It’s a little stiff, but if you work it...” she is telling them, but they are already rising to go.