The Toss of a Lemon (30 page)

But she is not imagining it. The boys on the other side of her garden wall, they are talking about her son. She moves closer, though there is no need, their voices are clear as well water.

“He came of age and was taken away!” one snorts, impressed at his own wit.

“Yeah, he came of age and rode away on a bullock cart!” says another, as though it was he who thought of it.

“Like a bride!” says another, as though no one had understood the joke before.

Sivakami knows, through her sources, that none of these boys made any mark, academically. There was only one other Cholapatti boy, apart from Vairum, who had done well. He had gone to Thanjavur, where one of his four sisters was married into a family of revenue officials. His parents had eight other sons, two of whom might even be in the crowd massed at her garden wall. Their brother was not being insulted.

Sivakami crouches by her wall, her face hot.

Then a neighbouring door opens: not Murthy’s, to her left, but the other, to her right, Dharnakarna, the witch.

From beyond her eastern wall, Sivakami hears the young witch’s slightly muffled voice: “Move away from my door with your dirty talk!”

The boys escape toward town, yelping with shared fear and collective bravado like skinny yellow pi-dogs.

Sivakami folds the letter exactly as Vairum must have, far away in Kottai, in a room she will never see. She knows he knows she is upset by the idea of his rooming with a Reddiar and can barely stomach the thought of his sleeping in the same room with a Christian, probably from a family of converted untouchables, she thinks, masses of whom were convinced by missionaries that Christians don’t have any truck with caste. He’s almost certainly descended from a lower caste, at the least. She’s amazed the other Brahmin boy’s parents permit it, but maybe they have as little control as she feels she does. When Vairum was admitted to a Christian college, she worried this would be the result, but Murthy persuaded her. St. Joseph’s is an excellent college, even if it’s not a Hindu one.

She slips the letter back into its envelope, imagining his hands doing that, writing his sums, eating his food. She tries to imagine the food, picturing great steaming vats of rice attended by Brahmin cooks. Chinnarathnam had made discreet inquiries on her behalf and reported that there were both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dining halls and that the cooks in the vegetarian hall were Brahmin, one of a few concessions by the British administration to the Brahmin parents, whose sons make up a significant segment of the student population.

She places the letter before the Ramar. Later, she will haltingly read it aloud for Muchami and Mari since they, too, relish news of Vairum’s great adventure.

VAIRUM FOLDS THE FINE PAPER in half and in half again and slips it into a pinkish-brown envelope. He scoops a crusty gob of official-smelling mashed-rice paste from the small pot on the corner of the worktable he shares with Francis Lourdesamy and smears it across the underside of the envelope flap. He addresses the sealed envelope to Minister and Gayatri: another brief but chatty note, another promise kept. He makes a point of thanking Minister for his advice and asking after their children. He does like the idea that he has people to write to, even if there is little he really wants to tell them.

He’s alone in his room and, as he folds his jingling pouch of silver into the waist of his dhoti, he wonders where the others are. His money pouch doesn’t include the silver piece he was permitted to keep from the gathering of coins that marked his return to Cholapatti. That coin is folded into his waistband, as always, separate from his spending money. It is, after all these years, as much a part of his daily toilet as hair oil and a fresh shirt. No one knows it’s there, and he doesn’t feel dressed without it.

He leaves the hostel and passes the temple tank, nervously putting his palms together to greet two of the maths masters, who overtake him, absorbed in serious conversation. They nod back, busy, friendly. Their recognition inflates him.

Exiting the campus gate, he takes the long way around the traffic roundabout, idly browsing the knick-knacks for sale. A woman squats against the wall of the main St. Joseph’s campus, behind an array of Ganesha statuettes. The largest is about eight inches tall, the smallest about two. They are beautiful: crude, geometric, of a wood so light as to seem made of foam. Vairum picks the little fellows up admiringly, one by one. Vermilion dots the pointed crown, the noble forehead, the trunk, hands, belly, feet—thirteen auspicious red smudges. Three grooves mark the bridge between the beady black eyes, three grooves cross the belly to imply a modest garment.

Vairum bends over the elephant-headed gods, unmindful of traffic and dust in the road, ignoring the woman grinning in fear at his white patches while unceasingly extolling her wares’ spiritual and artistic value.

He must have one—a companion to witness the commencement of this new enterprise, to help put the shoulder to unseen obstacles that may yet block his twisted road. He extracts from his pouch the price of a smart-looking fellow about three and a half inches tall.

His new purchase in one hand, his letter in the other, he waits now to cross to the post office when Govindasamy, one of his roommates, pulls up in front of him on a bicycle, and the others on another bike just behind him.

“Where were you, man?” calls Nattu, louder than necessary, as he falls off the handlebars. “We were looking for you.”

“Um, meeting with my physics tutor.” He grins back at them shyly.

Govindasamy points to his own handlebars. “Get on. We’re going swimming.”

“Ah, I—” Vairum looks at the letter in his hand, savouring their insistence.

“Get on,” Nattu yells again, already remounted. Francis wheels unsteadily through the traffic to turn left, narrowly missing a gourd vendor and his cart. They’re going to the river, the Kaveri, whose vicious seductions his mother had explicitly instructed him to resist, the only condition of his departure. This very afternoon, arriving at the physics building, his eye had caught, not for the first time, on a high-water mark memorializing one time the river had flooded the campus, running across fields to embrace the city in a morbid hug. Then there are times when one or another of the river’s dams are, without warning, released...

Govindasamy jabs his hand aggressively in the direction of his handlebars once more. “Get on!”

Oh, the sweetness of one’s company desired!

Vairum hops up on the handlebars, smiling widely as Govindasamy pushes off through the traffic.

The sun jigs on the docile water like Krishna on the defeated serpent’s hoods. Children splash and shriek, their mothers wash clothes. The city bakes. It’s the driest time of year. Vairum licks his lips; they taste of dust, of a cracked, parched road. Does the river look so wet and cool in Cholapatti? So meek? His feet rub sweatily in his shoes as he approaches the ghat with his friends.

This part of the river is three miles from the college. Vairum, looking up, sees the top edge of the Rock Fort, Malai Kottai. Here, the river looks more hospitable than agricultural, tame as an embassy party. Govindasamy, Francis and Nattu shed their clothes and descend the stairs at a point where the river is deep and narrow, dive in and swim to the opposite bank. Vairum hangs back a moment, his mouth open a little, gaping or panting, then shucks his shoes and clothes.

Ganesha sits on the bank, atop the letter addressed to Gayatri and Minister, facing the river as Vairum takes his first tentative steps down the stairs of the little ghat. The water is cool and Vairum first squats and splashes water on his dusty skin, then topples joyfully into the wet.

A cooling wind skims the water. The wooden Ganesha, light as river spume, topples onto its back and gazes at the sky. The letter lifts into the air, drops into the water and floats downstream. Cholapatti is the other way.

JUST PRIOR TO THE DEEPAVALI HOLIDAYS, in his second year of college, Vairum is required to attend a wedding. He is the family delegate to such occasions, since his mother is a widow and not invited and his sister, though invited, would be dependent on her husband to bring her. If the wedding is too far away, he can generally make an excuse, but at least three or four times a year it happens that the connection or location is too close for him to avoid it.

In this case, one of those Samanthibakkam cousins closest to him in age is marrying a girl from Thiruchi, so Vairum has no means whatever of wriggling free. He spends such occasions in a contemptuous funk, a quartz isle in what he perceives as a sea of mental poverty and ambitionlessness, and must employ elaborate means to keep himself from slumping into a puttylike pile of boredom. When he was small, he used to say multiplication tables under his breath for the entire time, three or five or, once, seven days running. The longer his attendance at the wedding the larger the final figure. These days, he occupies himself with the formulas of borders and business that will make him a big man.

His entire gang of Samanthibakkam cousins is in attendance, and Vairum vaguely recollects a great enthusiasm and warmth he had for them when he was very young, but age and time have intruded, and a shyness grown. They speak, but they don’t really know what to speak about. He avoids his aunts and uncles, who, on greeting him, all made cracks about the fact that the cousin marrying is his coeval, and isn’t it time Vairum got hitched as well? Sivakami has been asking him about this for the last six months, and he has firmly curtailed her: he is focusing on his studies; he isn’t ready.

He has not talked to her about the extreme anxiety of the prospect of a girl-seeing, given the reaction of most people to his skin condition. He would prefer to put off even thinking about it.

He stands at the back of the hall, fingering the coin at his waist under his new woollen vest. The weather has just recently grown temperate enough for him to show it off. All at once, a hushed reverence falls upon the gathering, from front to back. From the front, a veena’s lambent notes flow forward to occupy the quiet. A young girl plays, looking as if she had been born between the two gourd-resonators, her left hand maintaining the drone with rhythmic strokes while her right hand plucks the melody from the strings.

This is a new trend and the assembly is stunned. Only two kinds of music have ever been heard at weddings. The first is the nadaswaram, a six-foot horn with an obscene, nasal sound, with the
thavil,
a double-sided drum whose hard surfaces are staccatoed by fingertips encased in strips of cloth hardened with rice paste. Musicians are low caste—Brahmins expect them to be heard but not seen. Detached, uninterested, they play a particular song for each phase of the ceremony, and in crucial moments make a huge tootling din so as to drown out any sneeze. Sneezes are very bad omens at weddings.

The other music appropriate to weddings is religious songs, wheezed at prescribed moments by revered matrons. They know all the words, though their thin voices often disagree on tune and timing.

But now here is Vani, a young Brahmin girl, playing “Vallabha Nayakasya,” the veena’s tones breathed deep with devotion and training. Worthy of Madras concert halls (some think but do not say “brothels”), this Vani sits before them in the midst of a provincial wedding. Vairum hears the scandalized whispers start with the
mridangam’s
downbeat, as Vani finishes a brief but confident
aalapanai
like a first few raindrops against glass.

“What is this spectacle—a girl playing a concert at a wedding?”

“I have heard about such things. My son’s wife’s people are from Madras city. They have been doing such... concerts, at weddings, since two years now.”