The Toss of a Lemon (26 page)

Angamma stops swirling the
arathi
and watches them go. The lip of the brass plate droops until she looks down and sees the vermilion water has all spilled and is running along the ground toward the river. She cries out and drops to her knees, but the water has soaked into the earth. She wipes her hands across the red-veined dust and whimpers. She hurries after her brothers.

The youngest uncle wades out into the Kaveri. Muchami, whose body moves like a river weed in the current, is anchored by an arm stuck in a crevice of rock creeping out from the opposite bank. Red radiates from his head in a pump and slap that could be caused by the water or his heart. His eyelids are purple and swollen shut.

The uncle is up to his shoulders in the deadly water, unconscious of risk, when an undertow sweeps him down and away. He fights, as he did as a boy, when the river was forbidden to him as it is to his sons now. He wrestles the river and finds the opposite bank. His brothers, one by one, do the same, except the eldest, who runs puffing to the bridge and crosses there. He arrives as his brothers are climbing out upon the stones, their hearts in their mouths. They free their nephew from the clutch of rocks, lift him from his pale ruby halo, press him to their chests and lay him on the riverbank.

But he is breathing. He coughs and some water runs from his nose and mouth. They start to laugh, in small, tense bursts, like eager dogs, barking and panting. How can this be? Muchami is unconscious, bruised and badly cut, but he is alive. The five little boys had swum the river and now climb the bank to stand beside the uncles. The eldest asks them, “What did you see?”

The uncles, too, are still scared, since Muchami, though he is breathing, has not yet opened his eyes.

Angamma arrives, out of breath, and wails, “Does he live?” She is so relieved at the answer that she attacks him and must be pulled off, berating her unconscious son for all his rebellion, all his life. “When you were small, I forbade you to go to the river, but you defied me, you went, and went, until you became an expert swimmer, don’t deny it, I know, the proof was when you rescued Gopi Ayya’s daughter. So what’s the meaning of this? You went to take your bath this morning and forgot to stand up?”

The uncles carry Muchami to his mother’s hut, as she trots alongside, still lecturing him. They lay him down in his mother’s hut, and as Angamma argues with her brothers about whom to call to treat her son, Muchami’s eyes open to bright slits. His bride catches his glance, but he closes his eyes again. She thinks no one else has noticed, and this is proven correct when one self-appointed healer pushes through the crowd, flips Muchami over and begins pounding on his back. Muchami recovers quickly enough to escape much bruising.

Only a few days behind schedule, Muchami and Mari are installed in their hut, adjacent to his mother’s. They make their first physical acquaintance as patient and nurse.

One afternoon, while Angamma naps in her own hut, Mari speaks up. “Do you know I don’t care if I have children? Of the womb, I mean. I want you to know. Your sisters are having plenty, we can adopt one of theirs.”

Muchami laces his arms into a pillow and regards her calmly. He hasn’t gone to the fields in days; Sivakami forbade it. Nothing is expected of him as long as he is infirm. He has never taken his ease like this. Mari has just made it easier.

Beyond their thick mud walls, a chanted chorus arises, an obscene ditty with the names “Muchami” and “Mari” filling in the blanks, childish voices that then disperse in foot patter and laughter amazed at its own audacity.

“How can you not want children?” Muchami inquires wryly and Mari laughs, covering her mouth.

“I want respect. I want my husband to be clean and not shame me and not drink. My father is a good man, but I could not cope with the drinking.”

“I don’t drink.”

“I know.”

Another burst of children’s laughter comes through the window on a heat wave, from far away. Muchami knows he should be silent and grateful and never mention the subject again, but something in Mari’s manner makes him persist.

“Doesn’t everyone want children?”

“I am a religious person, I don’t fight fate. God has reasons. If I am meant not to bear children, I can be content with this.”

For the first time since his mishap, Muchami attempts to rise, but the room tilts and he wobbles down onto his knees before his wife. He casts his eyes down. “I am thankful.”

She nods.

AT TWELVE YEARS OLD, Vairum thinks little of the past, much of the future. He is religious, and disdains superstition and folkways. His academic performance is exceptional. His loss of colour, too, appears to have slowed or halted: although a fresh snowy patch appears at the start of each academic year, and with each anniversary of his father’s death, and although there is still some chittering gossip about those that show on his neck and arms, most of the Brahmin quarter has accepted the truth of Chinnarathnam’s aggressive proclamations on the condition. And since Vairum has never had friends, he hasn’t lost any. He causes his mother little trouble, so she chooses not to worry about him.

For a time, she worries about Muchami instead—cautious, conscientious Muchami nearly drowned in the Kaveri on the very day he was to bring home his bride. Why is it, Sivakami wondered—and then wondered if in wondering she was tempting fate—that terrible accidents so often happen on the happiest of days? It’s obviously the evil eye, cast by some poor soul festering with loneliness, but there is also a susceptibility that comes on such days—giddy joy that renders one unable to negotiate the rivers, kitchens and roads one has managed every day of one’s life.

Sivakami forbids Muchami to work for some months, until Mari and his mother judge him recovered. Muchami will not disobey but sends a return message: who will walk the fields? He names the tenants whose rent is due, along with three separate cases of complications and exceptions. The messenger, who was, until recently, Vairum’s schoolmate, stammers the details of the cases earnestly and with thorough incomprehension. Sivakami, who still walks the fields in her imagination, with the map her husband left, and so knows enough to know what makes sense, recognizes that the ex-schoolboy’s report is garbled and illogical.

However inauspicious the precipitating event, this does seem the opportunity for young Vairum to learn the landscape and methods that support his household. They sit down with the map his father constructed ten years earlier, and she goes over the basics. A few borders have changed, families grown, crops shifted, but Hanumarathnam made the chart flexible enough in its conception to admit evolution. It is soft and creased, like Sivakami’s two white saris, but it is still the best guide an heir could have.

“I know it’s a lot to absorb,” she smiles at him, “but if I can do it...”

“No, I get it, Amma,” he says, without looking up. He’s on his hands and knees and his shadow falls across the topography of their lands like a bird’s.

“You’ll have to take it to Muchami, because of course he is the one who goes out and talks to the tenants, as you will be doing. He keeps track of the day-to-day details. I only need summaries.”

“Mm-hm. Got it.”

“I’m proud of you.”

He looks up, a little shy.

“And your father would be proud of you, on this day.”

Vairum scowls. “If he were around, I wouldn’t even be doing this.”

“Of course you would: he would have given the map straight to you. I wouldn’t have even been in the picture.” He’s listening. “All this was meant to be yours, to manage as well as he did. Very hands-on, your appa. Knew everything that was happening. Make it your business to know.”

Clutching the map to his breast, Vairum marches over to Muchami’s hut to collect the correct information. On the community’s outskirts, he pauses at the sight of a small crew of his classfellows, Muchami’s castemates. They are horsing around in a game of keep-away; Vairum recognizes the disputed object as one boy’s prized cap. He slows to a halt and watches them, these boys who are not his friends. Once or twice a year, some boys (always Brahmins) start jeering at or teasing Vairum. Though these boys of Muchami’s caste readily do the same or worse to one of their own, they come instantly to Vairum’s defence.

They notice him and the game stops as they wait for him to approach them. His attention shifts to what he will say and how he should conduct himself, and so he is distracted from thinking that he wouldn’t mind being teased as mercilessly as the boy with the cap, if it meant he belonged.

“Muchami?” says Vairum, and they point to Muchami’s hut. It’s the longest conversation he’s had with them since his earliest overtures with trades and math. In the hut, Muchami tells Vairum it’s these talents he must summon, to determine if he is cheating his tenant, if his tenant is cheating him, if a merchant is cheating him or anyone else. The acceptability of the cheating involves other sorts of skills, he explains to the solemn boy, other varieties of calculations.

“Don’t mistake me,” Muchami says. “Your father managed his lands by the code of your caste. You can see that your mother, too, is as strict as strict can be with herself. A person must have a code. Then, if any man says, ‘You have done a wrong thing,’ you will be able to stand up and say, ‘According to my principles, it was right. And I can live by the principles of no other man.’ Understand?”

Vairum had grasped all the methods of calculation using weight, cost, quality and season on first explanation, but now wags his head with deep and evident uncertainty. Calculating on the principle of caste? What kind of maths is this?

“You see, Vairum, your father was a real Brahmin. He was a scholar and a healer. He could not be taken for a fool, nor could he appear greedy. How could he one day chastise a poor man for keeping back some few extra grains, and the next, give to the same man holy ash to quell his child’s diarrhea? He couldn’t. Yet he also couldn’t make of himself a laughingstock when every Mussulman market-man is giving him half-half his lentils’ worth. So, first thing first: I do most of the negotiating. These peasants are my castefellows. I know all of what they know, and more, and I know how to make them believe I know even more than that. Until I’m better, don’t bother doing any negotiating. You are just keeping an eye on things. Secondly, I will tell you all I know—and they know this. Good?”

Vairum nods with somewhat more confidence or, at least, relief: it’s evident that until Muchami returns to work, he’ll be able to stick to familiar territory.

That evening and the next, Vairum works diligently to make his own copy of his mother’s map. On parchment the exact size of the original, he measures, draws and annotates, first in lead and then, meticulously, in ink. He returns his mother’s copy to her and tells her, “Ask me any question, any property. Go on.”

“You don’t want to be looking at your copy?”

“No need. Ask. Come on.”

“Veerappan.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Crops and yields, nine months ago.”

“... Mm. No, not like that.” He waves his hand impatiently. “Ask me about now, not ancient history.”

“Oh, yes. Well, tell me who-all owns the pond and the well on Achchappan’s plot.”

He is silent for a second, then bursts out impatiently, “Why do you keep asking me things that are not even on the map? How am I supposed to know all that? I’m in school, not out gossiping with the tenants.”

“I’m sorry, dear one. I ... thought all that was on the map.” She believes this because, if it weren’t, how would she know the answers?

“Well if it were, I would know it.”

“Of course, my dear,” she says, eager to keep their feeling of complicity.

“I know everything I need to know,” he reminds her. “I got all the calculations right, first time.”

“Of course.” She knows how smart he is.

He neglects to mention that this applied only to the mathematical calculations. Calculations that factor caste by profession to the power of social status, divided by wealth—these, he will have to grow into. His mother guesses at this and is pleased anyway that he has learned enough to become interested, and is interested enough to learn more.

Each day of Muchami’s absence, Vairum rises an hour earlier than usual and walks the fields before school. In the late afternoon, he walks the lands for another hour or two, beginning and ending this walk with a visit to Muchami, to discuss his findings. Several people cheat Vairum; several people who always try to cheat Muchami don’t try to cheat Vairum, perhaps out of sympathy for the fatherless child. Vairum prefers being cheated: he wants to be treated like a man.

In the first weeks of Muchami’s recovery, Vairum shares every detail of his discoveries with his mother. His evening meal sits untouched as he relates litanies of rules and exceptions in ownership, announces projections of profits and shortfalls, and even starts making tentative pronouncements on various feuds. His mother reminds him repeatedly to eat, but each time, he takes a mere mouthful and starts talking again.

Sivakami already knows much of what he tells her but enjoys his enthusiasm hugely. She delights in watching her son learn, and learn something close to what she herself knows, unlike the formulas and geography and English that fill his days at school, so far away up the road into town. She can’t walk a mile to school in his shoes, but she can shadow him through the fields. He, too, is learning that he likes these formulas better than those of math, physics and chemistry, where the laws are those of the physical world and cannot be bought or bent.