The Toss of a Lemon (38 page)

Six months later, no one has received a refund. Goli has spent this time trying to convince those few remaining men who have not yet invested with him to back him in setting up a sesame oil refinery, but without success. A little jealousy may have entered their relations, and now, in the wake of his failure, a little schadenfreude. Goli’s odour of indebtedness also means his charm isn’t quite as effective as once it was.

Muchami hears things are getting rocky between Goli and his devadasi but withholds this information from Vairum, who doesn’t ask but assumes as much.

Thangam has started to shed again, copiously, and is starting to show: she is pregnant once more.

For some reason, Sivakami doesn’t dare tell Vairum about the pregnancy, but, one day, he notices.

“Ah, great,” he says, clasping his hands, glittering ill will from his diamond-black eyes as Thangam appears to shrink. “That’s just what you and your profligate husband need. Well, it doesn’t matter—you’ll pack another off to live with us. The boy is first in line, now, isn’t that right?”

“Vairum!” Sivakami says from the kitchen.

He leaves, with a dismissive gesture at his mother. Sivakami stands watching Thangam, who is curved around her stomach as though trying to make it disappear. Could that be the problem? Thangam is
ashamed
of her husband,
ashamed
of her children. Vairum should be ashamed of himself. She wonders if she should say something to him later. How can she, though, when he has been so generous toward his sister and her children, and wants children of his own so badly? Who can blame him for being a little resentful?

And now, Muchami tells Sivakami, “I understand the house is vacated.” Goli sold the furniture; all that remains are the few trunks of pots and saris with which they arrived. These will be sent along after him. Thangam will stay in Cholapatti through her delivery.

“It’s God’s will that they move on. I can’t question.”

Muchami nods.

“Are you feeling all right?” Sivakami quizzes him.

He tries to look a little more lively. He feels like he has spent two years putting out fires. It was wonderful having Thangam nearby, but he’s not sorry to see Goli go.

Sivakami’s feelings are even more mixed. She’s not sure it has even been beneficial to Saradha and Visalam to have their mother near: they seemed more confused than enriched, and always looked scared of their father. Muchami looks exhausted. She’s not sure why—surely the extra trips back and forth were not so great a strain? Vairum will certainly be more relaxed, and she will, too: she was always dreading the prospect of a confrontation between them.

But now the two years are over, and no harm done, she thinks with resolute cheer. Another grandchild on the way.

SIVAKAMI CONTINUES TO OBSERVE VAIRUM, without asking questions, which he does not welcome. Her tension about his professional prospects has ebbed with his increasing success. He not only managed their own lands very effectively, but purchased other parcels not thought to be productive and turned them around, quickly saving enough to buy a rice mill, whose output he has also increased, Muchami tells her, by 40 per cent. She has stopped worrying about him in this regard, but he still has no child, and it wears on him, especially as Thangam’s children continue steadily to fill their house.

Thangam has given birth to two more daughters. The manjakkani money has been put to ample use for Laddu’s poonal, and Saradha’s wedding, which was contracted four years prior, her first Deepavali and trips to her husband’s home, and her coming-of-age ceremony and departure last year. She married into a stable family in Thiruchi, distant relatives, and it is deeply satisfying to Sivakami to know she is so well settled. The relentlessly jolly Visalam has married but not yet gone to her husband’s house. Laddu is nine, a resolutely unambitious boy; Sivakami would be tearing her hair out if she had any. Vairum tutors him in math and science, and she has just hired a tutor in Sanskrit, but none of it seems to help. Sita, who came to stay late last year, is six years old and already has the black tongue of a harridan, a curse or insult always at the ready. Thangam’s first two children didn’t prepare Sivakami for the second two, and she prays daily for energy and cunning enough to raise them as she must.

It is to this that her thoughts always turn as she does her chores, as today, when she is slicing a turnip and muttering a mantra in worship of Rama.
Rama Ramaya Namaha. Rama Ramaya Namaha
...

“Mundai !”

The ugly word jumps like a toad across her thoughts and she hollers, “Sita!” She considers rising and finding her foul-mouthed granddaughter but decides it’s better the child learn to obey a summons. “Sita! Come here!” Sivakami is shocked by the tone of her own voice. Guiding Thangam’s first two through the maze of manners and comportment never required any but the lightest touch. Where on earth would the child have heard a word like that? What could cause her to think she could use it?

The little girl sidles into the doorway, eyes cast down.

“That word has never been spoken in this house before. You are responsible for bringing this ugliness into our home.”

Sita pouts. It’s clear she feels bad, but only because she has upset her grandmother. That she has called her older sister a shaven-headed widow—for this, she is not repentant.

“Go study and not a peep.”

Sita slinks away, her beautiful features obscured by this deep yellow rage she seems to have been born with, and which her first five years, living in God-only-knows what kind of neighbourhoods, did nothing to temper. Sivakami hasn’t tried to fathom it. Sita is here now and a good upbringing takes a small creature with all its quirks and kinks and trains it to behave like any worthy person, fulfilling duty and accepting fate.

From what she could hear, Sita was frustrated because she wanted Visalam to play a game, which Visalam cannot because she is menstruating, isolated in the back room. For the first time: Visalam came of age yesterday. Sivakami thought it a shame the child’s mother-in-law lived too far away to come for the celebration but then it might have been better that she didn’t see her son’s wife giggling throughout the most solemn parts of the ceremony and guffawing through the gay ones. Visalam finds everything funny. Sivakami tells her to watch that the crows don’t snatch the little rice flour morsels of
vadam
as they dry on the roof—hilarious. When, once or twice annually, they choose new clothes, Visalam must invariably be excused, laughing so hard she’s useless. School, needless to say, has been a trial, but that’s all over now that she is no longer a girl.

Anyone around her who is inclined to humour is compelled to laugh with her. Anyone not so inclined feels mocked. By some stroke of God’s grace, however, she married into a relaxed and mirthful family, perhaps the only one Sivakami has ever met which is truly so. While they generally seem capable of the modicum of sobriety Visalam is never able to summon, they are indulgent toward the girl, who is, after all, obedient and respectful.

As Sivakami stands to reach for the sambar
podi,
she feels a little trickle. She clenches her thighs and hobbles out along the platform behind the house and back in through the door of the back room. There, she sees a bead of red releasing a trail of smaller beads as it rounds her ankle bone and descends her instep to soak into the brick floor. She reaches under the cot for the box of rags and discreetly fixes one round her hips before shouting for Sita, muttering, as she always does, against the inconvenience of it. “Really, it’s too silly—a grandmother, widowed for how many years? Sita!” she calls again, and Sita, who had been crouched over a school book in the garden and pretending not to hear, pokes her head around the door. “Go next door and tell Rukmini that I am in the room with Visalam. Go and come, you.”

Visalam is wheezing through her knuckles. Sivakami squats in a corner and chuckles a little, too. She normally doesn’t look at her granddaughters during the days of their pollution, but must admit it is nice to have this extra time with Visalam, knowing that soon the girl will leave for her marital home.

Menstruation always makes Sivakami feel strange, though she merely trades one kind of untouchability for another. Where she is normally too pure to be touched, not to mention a potent reminder of feminine destructive power, for these three days she is too impure to be touched, and a potent reminder of feminine procreative power.

And now there is a knocking and hallooing at the front door: Laddu’s Sanskrit teacher. Sivakami shouts, “Enter, enter!” but cannot make herself heard above Vani’s playing. Thankfully, Rukmini arrives at the front door in the same moment.

“Sivakami!” Rukmini shouts from the front. She has, for thirty years now, managed Sivakami’s household during menstrual leaves of absence. “Sivakami?”

“I am here,” Sivakami replies, closing to a crack the narrow double door leading onto the main hall.

“Sivakami, young Kesavan is here to tutor Laddu in Sanskrit.”

“Is Laddu there?”

Now Rukmini starts shouting Laddu’s name.

Sivakami tries to make a suggestion. “Is... Rukmini Akka! Is Sita ... Rukmini Akka!”

Rukmini stops.

Sivakami asks, “Is Sita there? Ask her to find Laddu.”

“No,” replies the other woman. “Sita stayed at my house to eat biscuits and play with the dog.”

“Oh. Young Kesavan, I’m very sorry.” Sivakami speaks through the crack between the doors. “Only the third session and Laddu is absent again. I’m so sorry. Rukmini, ask Sita to go find her brother. Or find Muchami and ask Muchami to find Laddu.”

“Yes, um, I reminded him,” the young man answers as Rukmini bustles away importantly, “right after his Sanskrit class in school.”

This does nothing to relieve Sivakami’s embarrassment.

“I’d like”—he moves nearer the door and clears his throat—“to, um ... there are other boys in the class who could use the extra help. I will tell you in confidence, however”—he coughs but sounds as if he’s gaining surety—“that their parents cannot afford a tutor. Or they cannot see the necessity of Sanskrit. Though it is a necessity, as I have told you—the right colleges look very positively on those students who are familiar with the classical language. Perhaps, if you would agree, I can suggest that those boys attend, here with Laddu, to help lend more of an ... atmosphere. They are boys Laddu likes. He would make sure to come home if they were coming also. He wouldn’t miss it.”

Laddu has been falling dreadfully behind in his studies, lacking aptitude, conscience and enthusiasm. Sivakami wonders, when she looks at him, whether she is seeing what Goli was like as a young chap. Pressure to play host might be just the thing.

“Certainly, Kesavan. You invite the boys. That’s good.” Sivakami feels slightly vertiginous and lifts her sari
pallu
off her back to her shoulders so that the cool wall is against her skin. “Is Rukmini there? Rukmini!”

Rukmini has just returned.

“Rukmini, give young Kesavan a cup of milk.”

Kesavan makes clucking noises in protest, but Sivakami speaks over him. “Find some murrukku and laddu as well.”

“If you have Laddu, I’ll teach the class!” Kesavan lamely attempts to make light of the situation. Rukmini laughs a little and Visalam as if she will never stop, but Sivakami is glad no one can see her face and lies flat on the cool floor, willing the season of cramps to pass.

Rukmini takes the vegetables that Sivakami has already sliced back to her own kitchen, where she and her mother-in-law integrate them into their sambar. Sita, Laddu, Vani and Vairum eat there that evening, as do Muchami and Mari the next day. Rukmini brings food for Visalam, and leaves the monkeys’ offering in the customary spot in the forest beyond the courtyard. Rukmini and Murthy even scold Laddu on Sivakami’s behalf, though Sivakami scolds him, too.

The next day, Vani gets her period: Sivakami had been expecting this. They have been roughly synchronized for years. The mood in the room shifts, though, with Vani’s entrance: five years, and she and Vairum have yet to produce an heir. Vairum’s evident and mounting emotion at this lack gives Sivakami one more reason to feel ashamed whenever she has her period. But of course it isn’t her menstruation that renders Vairum unable to meet anyone’s eye during his wife’s isolation, it is Vani’s. Vairum becomes visibly depressed each month, skipping meals, becoming curt with the rest of the family.

A week later, Saradha arrives in preparation for the delivery of her first child. A woman normally goes to her mother’s house, to be looked after in the comfort of the home she has known, but Thangam is setting up house in yet another part of the presidency and is in no position to pamper Saradha as she deserves. In any case, Sivakami has come to be called Amma, “mother,” by the children, who refer to their mother as Akka, “big sister.” Sivakami is not sure when this started or whether she should do something about it, but it does reflect the children’s reality at least in part. So Saradha comes to her amma’s, at seven months, for her bangle ceremony, and now, to deliver.

The day arrives, and Sivakami sends Muchami to fetch the old women who deliver babies, but, when they arrive, she and Sivakami stop short at Saradha’s look of panic. “No, Amma!” she says, gripping Sivakami’s arm, which shocks Sivakami as much as anything. Even as a small child, Saradha never violated her grandmother’s madi.

“What is it, kannama?”

“You have to deliver my baby, Amma. You have kai
raasi.
Just like you delivered me and my brothers and sisters. You have to do it, Amma. Please, Amma!”

Kai raasi: lucky hands. Sivakami feels like Saradha has tied them. She is scared of her own inexperience, but superstition scares her more: after Thangam had her first, Sivakami would not turn the job over to anyone else, and now it appears she may have to do the same for her granddaughter. Now that Saradha has said the words,
kai raasi,
it would be bad luck to say no.