The Toss of a Lemon (28 page)

Thangam returns for the birth of her second child, bringing her first. When the time comes, Sivakami births this child, as she did Thangam’s first. Why? Because she attended the first, and both children have lived. One of the principles of a superstitious society is: don’t fool with working formulas. If once a practice has a good result, it becomes a tradition; to change it would be arrogance against fate.

One day, at her usual time, Gayatri comes brimming with news and sits in the courtyard, within earshot of Thangam in the birth room, Muchami and Mari weaving thatch and sorting rice at their posts and Sivakami in the kitchen.

“I don’t know if you heard,” she says. “It’s too terrible. That woman, Madam Besant, who has been agitating for independence, was interned a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, it has made her more popular than ever!” She holds a rolled-up newspaper in her lap.

“Jail?” Muchami asks doubtfully.

“Oh, yes! Do you remember who she is, Sivakamikka? She’s the English lady, head of that theosophical society, the crackpot.”

“She’s a great friend to Brahmins,” Mari contributes without raising her eyes from the rice grains she is sorting, tossing them in a shallow three-sided basket. “One of my relatives said she thinks we should return to Manu’s laws.”

“True, but she doesn’t even know what she’s saying.” Gayatri might sound as though she’s questioning non-Brahmins who admire Brahmin principles too intensely, but in fact it’s simply that it spoils her pleasure to tell a story to anyone who disagrees with her, even by a shade. “She doesn’t know any Sanskrit, or any other Indian language, and she advocates breaking down caste and giving full voting representation to everyone.” Gayatri knows Mari can’t approve of this. She continues. “It’s of real importance that she be brought down. The talk is that she is heading for Congress leadership. She says everything those independence types want her to.” Gayatri reflexively lowers her voice as though she doesn’t want to be overheard. “There has been a rash of articles lately, mostly written by one very interesting doctor, a Nair. He started the Justice Party—you know, they are firmly against this independence nonsense. So this week, he wrote a column about the behaviour of Madam Besant’s theosophical colleague, that Mr. Charles Leadbeater. You don’t want to know the details, but he behaved very improperly, with young boys, and it’s not good for voters—well, for anyone, to forget that kind of association. And so my husband added his voice to the chorus. Look!”

She opens the paper that she has been clutching, the Madras Mail, an English-language daily aimed at the Madras Presidency’s British business class. She folds it back to the letters page and points at one item, a few paragraphs long, circled in ink. “My husband wrote it.” She holds it longer than necessary under each eager nose: Sivakami is only functionally literate in Tamil, and Mari and Muchami not even that; none of them could pick English out of a lineup. Even Gayatri knows only from the position of the masthead whether she’s holding the paper upside down.

“He signed it ‘Keeping the Faith.’ It’s mostly about the need to preserve the empire, you know, continuity, India’s rightful place in the world.”

Vairum arrives at the salon as Minister is arranging the papers on a settee: the Madras Mail is on the top of the pile, folded to display the letters page. One letter is circled in red ink, and Vairum picks the paper up to have a closer look at it. Minister winks at him.

One reason Vairum attends the salon whenever he can is to work on his English, which is still rudimentary, though quickly improving. While some of the conversation eludes him, he finds phrases echoing in his head later and tries them on his English tutor, or on Minister himself, who has agreed, at Vairum’s request, to speak to him only in that language.

Vairum runs his eyes along the lines of print with controlled desperation.

“Kulithalai!” Vairum exclaims. “Was it written by one of your, um, friends?” He’s not sure what to call them, since they seem held together by something other than friendliness, a feeling he doesn’t quite understand but intends to: another reason he comes whenever he can.

“Better than that, son,” Minister says, going into his library, an adjoining room through a set of double doors. “It was written by yours truly.”

Minister looks back when he doesn’t respond, and laughs. “Me! I wrote it. It’s about time they knew what we’re thinking out here about all that nonsense.”

“Oh! Quite,” Vairum says, one of his favourite English expressions of assent. “Quite.” He perches on the settee to read the papers and wait for the regulars to arrive, while Minister unwraps some new books, a package from Higginbotham’s in Madras, and another from Penguin of London, and sorts them into his already substantial collection.

Vairum regularly borrows from him, things he finds and things Minister recommends, from Sir Wm. Wedderburn’s book
A
.
O
.
Hume: Father of the Indian National Congress
to classical Tamil dramas, analyses of the
Periya
Puranam as well as Sarma’s Toward
Swaraj.
Minister reads all the tracts published by the Indo-British Association, such as Indian Problems: Caste in Relation to Democracy, or Indian Opposition to Home Rule:
What
the British Public Ought to Know, and Vairum struggles through these also, still unsure of what will be important to him as he makes his own way. Minister also takes newspapers of every political stripe, and Vairum browses the political and social pages but finds he pays most attention to business and finance. Sometimes, the same stories are covered in Tamil and English, a great help to his comprehension.

Minister doesn’t even keep track of which books Vairum borrows, trusting him to come and go as he likes, so Vairum has also groped his way through such reference works as
Kissing in Theory and Practice
, Pandora’s Letter Box: Being
a
Discourse on Fashionable Life by the Author of the Technique of the Love Affair and Marie Stopes’s Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, which he found at least as informative as The Indian Constitution: An Introductory
Study,
though, again, to what end he is not sure.

He hears the first of Minister’s cronies coming up the stairwell off the veranda. Minister exits his library onto the balustraded corridor that connects all the upstairs rooms. He leans over the rail to shout through a skylight into the main hall below, “Gayatri! Snacks!” and then turns right to open another set of double doors into the salon, sliding bolts into the floor to hold them open. He checks the soil in two pots of ragged posies and adjusts the position of an occasional table as his cronies enter.

The two men arrive already arguing. They are close acquaintances and colleagues. One, whom Vairum has never heard speak below shouting volume, is N. Ranga, a Chettiar by caste, moneylender and compounder by trade, who now has several storefronts. His successes interest Vairum keenly. Ranga opened a Thiruchi branch, Ranga and Sons, some eight years back, where he stocks patent medicines and toilet products that he has test-marketed at his original location. The other is a Brahmin, Dr. C. P. Kittu Iyer, an undistinguished and lead-fingered practitioner (Vairum gathers) of the medical arts, who never ceases to criticize the compounder for pimping quack medicines. Kittu Iyer still sends his patients to Ranga to have prescriptions filled, though, because, as a medicine-maker, Ranga is skilled and honest, the best in the district. His dealings in skin-lightening lotions and tuberculosis tonics haven’t hurt his professional reputation, either because people don’t distinguish these from his legitimate trade, or because they understand the nostrums are purely a business concern.

“The man is a traitor!” Ranga hoots as though through a venom-filled whistle. “To us, and to his own people!”

“It is a victory for the right and might, but we must remain vigilant. There is no guarantee this is not a trick,” Kittu rejoins as though addressing a much larger audience.

“Do you get what they’re on about?” Minister asks Vairum, as he takes a seat beside his protégé.

Vairum shakes his head.

“Look again at the headlines. Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, made an announcement to the House of Commons, of Britain’s intent to increase Indian representation in administration—see
^?
” He points to one article, and then to another: “‘... with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.’ There was no warning. Stunning.” He rearranges the papers so that the Madras Mail with his letter is once more on the top.

Vairum has heard enough about these matters in the salon, and from Minister, to have a sense of how its members will divide. Non-Brahmins such as Ranga, a Chettiar, will restate fears that granting India independence at this juncture would mean handing the country over to an elite coterie of northern Brahmins. Brahmins such as Kittu, an Iyer, believe this seems like a good idea. Minister will be the only Brahmin to oppose the move toward independence, and the one who will take the move most personally. His salon is decorated with drawings of Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament he made as a child, hung on the western wall above a row of fragile potted flowers; in one corner of the library is a stack of empty Peek Freans biscuit tins; on a shelf, his bottle of No. i McDowell’s brandy, proudly displayed. He drinks a carefully measured inch each night after supper. “I live with my mother and father,” he once told Vairum. “Loyalty. Habit. My country is a participant in—not victim of—a grand and noble scheme. The British do things better. Nothing wrong with the Indian way, but nothing to lose, wot?”

Vairum watches Minister now, one leg crossed over the other, bouncing nervously as the sportif Muthu, of the Reddiar caste, rounds the stairs. “The wires are buzzing—what a to-do!” Muthu says, puffing.

He mops his expansive brow and grins at the two first arrivals, who have taken seats as far as possible from one another, and at Minister, who smiles back paternalistically and responds, “But who are ‘they,’ dear chap?”

Vairum thinks, dear chap, dear chap, savouring the unfamiliar syllables as Minister goes on. “My impression is that much of the Commons was taken as off guard by this announcement as we. For whom does Montagu speak?”

Slim, chic K.T. Rama Sastri, another Brahmin—lawyer by training, lounger by inclination—recites from the doorway, “‘Now is God’s purpose in us perfected / Complete the work of Clive and Nicholson / When in this Empire that their swordblades won / Authority is mocked and buffeted / And England’s voice, no more the lion’s they knew / Becomes the whisper of this Wandering Jew.’ Nothing like a bit of doggerel to start the day off right.”

“Har-har!” Muthu Reddiar slaps his knee. “That was this morning’s Madras Mail, isn’t it?”

“Yes, by the editor,” says Rama, pointing a pinky out as he accepts a china teacup from a tray the cook’s daughter is bearing self-consciously around the room. “He could hold his tongue no longer.”

Vairum tries pointing a pinky out, too, but can’t keep it there as he takes the teacup. He forces himself to put his mouth to the edge and slurp. The thought that his mother would be scandalized to see him drink this way is some motivation: in his house, they hold a silver tumbler above their mouths and pour, to avoid pollution from any saliva that has ever touched the cup. Mostly, though, Vairum does it because it seems an important, cosmopolitan skill, though he overcomes a little revulsion to do so.

“It is a serious question, however,” R. V. Mani Iyer is saying. He is the salon’s most recent Brahmin addition and is politically committed—to Congress and independence, as is usual for Brahmins. Several years behind Minister at school, he did a B.A. at St. Joseph’s College in Thiruchi, where Vairum has also decided he wants to go. “Montagu seems a man of real disinterest and integrity...” He ignores a “Pshaw!” from Ranga Chettiar, punctuated by a soaring morsel of onion
budji.
“But he is a Jew, and we know how deep communal loyalties run. How can we with all our hearts accept this promise from someone the English cannot truly claim as their own?”

The last of the salon regulars slinks in—S. Gopi, another Chettiar, a grain and dry goods dealer. He has a couple of rice mills and has also recently started vending “Modern Pots” in new shapes and alloys, yet his tone around Ranga, his Chettiar castemate, bespeaks a defensive sense of inferiority. Gopi has no sons, and no shop in Thiruchi. Though he employs several of his sons-in-law in his concerns, his failure to expand beyond Kulithalai district is seen by some as a reluctance to build a fortune that will simply pass out of the family line. He has been heard proclaiming that small business is good business, but his customarily sarcastic tone makes it tough for Vairum to tell when he is sincere.