The Toss of a Lemon (54 page)

“It’s a good bet, the cinema, Athimbere.” Vairum is no longer hesitating. “The only aspect of the proposal that makes me nervous is the fact that you are in charge.”

Sivakami, Muchami and Gayatri simultaneously lower their foreheads onto their palms.

“But the amount of investment you need takes the project largely out of your hands,” Vairum proceeds, reasonable and direct. “I will front the rest of the money—because it gives me the controlling interest. You must admit, it’s safer, for you and for everyone else involved.”

Incredibly, Goli has said nothing through this speech, but now he sounds as though he is orbiting madly, an electron around Vairum’s nucleus.

“I spit on your money, you cheap-nosed freak of a not-quite-man ! How dare you insult me with your generosity! Don’t you think for a second you are getting any part of this so let that be a lesson to you with your swell-headed individualistic ambitions and attitudes! I ought to—”

Vairum bellows, “You cannot for a second speak of what it is to be a man, you who leave your children to be raised by others.”

Sivakami prays the children did not hear that. (They did.) She knows Vairum doesn’t mind the children’s presence, not at all. It is Goli he resents. Oh, why did she suggest this?

Goli’s voice circles as he charges down the spiral staircase. He pitches into the hall from the stairwell, chopping the side of his right hand against his left palm.

“Pack your bags. We are leaving.” He flies around the room, shoving each child in the direction of Thangam’s baggage, which stands ready in the corner of the hall. “No objections, children! You will not insist any longer on living in this house. Time and again I have tried to make you all come and live with me. You always refuse: my Vairum Mama says this, my Sivakami Patti says that!”

What he is saying is untrue, but this is immaterial.

Sita is hauled to her feet, unprotesting but also largely unconscious. Laddu, Janaki and Kamalam mill into one another, bumping, confused. Radhai, the toddler, howls and shoves her mother’s sari into her mouth as Thangam moves toward the door. Visalam has stealthily backed out into the garden with her baby. Chances are Goli won’t notice her, but Sivakami closes the garden door just in case.

“No more!” Goli hollers. “This time, I will not take no for an answer. Go, pack!”

The children have no idea what this means as far as they are concerned.

“PACK
^!
”

Sivakami indicates that Muchami should fetch a trunk from upstairs.

They all get on the 92:35 train that night. By morning, they will reach the Karnatak country, where Goli is stationed at present, the farthest they have ever been from home.

THEY ARRIVE AT TEN IN THE MORNING, by which time Cholapatti would have been sweltering and still. In Cholapatti, the packed air is so hot and moist that every villager feels a privileged proximity to Goddess Earth—each person feels her sweat.

In the Karnatak country, the air swirls and rustles round, cool as the children have known only water to be, water dippered from the big clay pot in the darkest corner of the pantry. The house is like theirs in Cholapatti; the same brick floors and clay-shingled roof, but smaller. It is a government-issue house and comes with a government-issue houseboy who bobs ingratiatingly as they arrive and then disappears.

The children watch their father take soap and a towel and stride toward the back of the house. He returns ten minutes later, shaved and washed. They are still in the front hall, mostly still standing and very quiet. The one or two who sat scramble to their feet. Goli looks at them with indignant expectation. He shouts, “Not clean yet? Move!”

Laddu and Sita rush to the back, grabbing towels where they saw Goli do so. There must be more than one bathroom, they think, if they were supposed to be bathing while Goli was. But no, there is only one bathroom. One by one, then, they bathe in cold water and then sit in the hall, uncomfortable.

Goli paces and mutters, to and fro, up and down, sometimes right out the front door. Each time one of the children stands to take her turn at the bath, he shouts, “Move!” at the receding back, which then jumps and runs for the bathroom.

Thangam is exhausted from the trip and lies under a thin dhurri with the baby in the other room. As the last child is bathing, Thangam calls out feebly, “There is no food in the house. You have to get them some food.”

Goli boomingly echoes his wife, “No food in the house? No food in the house. Okay, we will eat out.” He starts out the door, but no one follows him. He returns to the door and shouts, “Come!”

Kamalam is still in the washroom. The other children point that way.

“Hm? What?”

“Kamalam is still taking her bath,” Sita says helpfully.

Kamalam comes hurrying along at that moment.

“Hm!” Goli sweeps his hand upward and starts out the door again. The children run to follow him. Their hair is still uncombed, and Kamalam’s blouse is buttoned wrong, but they are reasonably clean. They turn two corners and stop in front of a low building: two parallel walls connected by a thatch roof, steam coming out the open ends. Goli enters, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t you tell your grandmother. I don’t want to be hearing about this forever.”

It is a non-Brahmin establishment. Their grandmother would never let them near such a place. Janaki very much disapproves, but what is morality on an empty stomach?

A harried-looking boy looks up at them from the floor, where he is clearing disposable plates made from stitched-together leaves. He throws the plates, coated with the remains of meals, to two grateful dogs in a roadside ditch. His eyes swing to a man squatting shinily among vats and cauldrons. The place seats only five, and two places are taken. Goli has now taken a third. The man looks at the children, then addresses his pots. “They’ll have to eat in shifts, that’s all.”

The children give one another looks. They didn’t understand the man. It is as though his words come from funny places in his mouth. It hadn’t struck home before: this is the Karnatak country they have learned of in school, where people speak the Kannada language. But why would they speak a language no one can understand? Tamil is normal, Kannada is strange, like a one-legged bird or two-headed cow—recognizable but not the way things are meant to be.

Their father is yelling, “Sit! Sit!”

The boy has laid out two more places. They all step forward together. Panic surges in the boy’s face and he says something to Goli. Goli raises one hand to point at the dish the boy is carrying and says to the children, “Only two of you now. Not enough room.”

Sita flounces forward to take her place, dragging Radhai. Kamalam, Laddu and Janaki politely watch the dogs instead of the diners. The dogs, dirt collected in the hollows between their jagged ribs, lap the sauces and grains from the ridges of the leaves, always licking twice where once would do. Finally, they do a quick sniffover. Finding no more pickings, one mounts the other and starts a dance. Janaki knows enough to look away and Laddu knows enough to know why, but Kamalam keeps staring, her mouth slightly ajar, until Janaki spins her by the shoulder to face the street.

The food is as strange as everything else. Goli vanishes upon finishing his meal, citing important business. By the time the children find their way back to the house, which is still cold and dark, homesickness is burling up in them. It will soon harden and form a ring, marking the end of one age, the beginning of another.

Only Sita is perfectly cheerful, bright-eyed and willing as they have never seen her. She arranges their bundles neatly in the hall. Thangam rises while she is doing this.

“Amma,” Sita inquires, apparently having decided that now they are together as a family, her mother should be addressed as such, “shall I take the baby for a while? Don’t you want to bathe?”

Thangam gives them the mixed blessing of her smile, like the sun shining through clouds. Sita takes baby Krishnan, and Thangam goes to her bath. When she returns, they sit together on the veranda, relieved that these are also a fixture in this strange new country. In the combined strength of Thangam’s faint glow and the dilute sunshine, they begin to feel almost warm.

Neighbourhood children grow curious about them, but since they cannot speak to one another, they choose the shared language of sand-lot cricket. Even the girls join in, but not Sita, who takes stock of the staples and purchases vegetables and milk, lamp oil and kolam powder out of the ten rupees Sivakami slipped to her as they left. She even cleans a little. When Goli returns from work, Sita bustles to the door and hands him a hot tumbler of coffee.

Goli appears sullen and takes his coffee wordlessly out onto the veranda. Janaki and Kamalam are out there, playing at catching the other’s hand, like bear cubs slapping at river fish. They become quiet at the sight of Goli’s face, but their giggles quickly escalate once more, until Goli howls, “Hush!”

They freeze.

“Am I sweating to earn your keep so that you can torture... ?” He jabs his hand at them, and then lapses back into his ruminations.

Supper is a silent matter. Laddu makes one attempt to tell the story of something funny he saw on their journey, but Goli breathes harder, the huff and puff of a coming storm. Janaki signals her less barometrically sensitive brother to abandon the story.

Sita is still suspiciously happy. She serves all of them first and eats afterward with Thangam.

The days pass, without school, almost without talk. Janaki has never lived with so few words. They continue to play with the neighbour children, games the children know from home; you don’t need to talk to play kabbadi.

Sita, though, seems to be completely occupied in housework. Janaki is suspicious because she has always tricked others into doing her chores, faking a cut by making blood out of vermilion powder mixed in water, or trading tasks so relentlessly that Janaki would lose track of who owed whom and end up doing all the work. Here, Sita is industrious to the point of making them all a bit nervous.(Is Sita happy because all is finally as it should be? For the first time she feels part of the natural order? But few admit, even though they know, that the order’s nature is that its elements line up only to drift apart again. Sita appears happy, but she smells of desperation.)

Thangam works alongside Sita, offering no instructions or suggestions even when Sita turns out rubbery dosais and powdered condiments one would sooner use to dust a baby’s bottom than to fire up a meal. It is strange that the house and position don’t come with a government-issue cook, Janaki thinks, but perhaps no stranger than anything else.

One evening, Janaki and Kamalam see their dad at the end of the road, talking with two dark and paunchy men. They are all laughing, slapping their thighs. Goli spots his daughters and calls them over. As they arrive he grabs them by the shoulders and tells the men, “Two of mine.” He slaps his daughters on their backs. “Finally got them out of the grip of my brother-in-law. None of his own, you know?” He turns his head sideways and gives a wink. “None of his own. Right?”

The men laugh again.

“I’ve got more than I can count,” Goli brags. “That brother-in-law, rich as a Chettiar, but will he share it? Ah, what to do? The poor fellow can’t have kids...”

The two men giggle.

“I’ll forgive him.” Goli shakes his head and squishes the two girls together. They can’t remember him ever touching them before. “You know, if it’s true that a man’s real fortune is his family, and you and I know it is, well then I’m a millionaire.” Goli shoves the girls toward home and says, “Run. Tell your sister I’m on my way home, coffee better be ready. Scoot.”

Generally, home supplies are purchased on credit, the bill paid quarterly. Cash is used only for the daily purchase of vegetables from the market or passing vendors. Here, in the Karnatak country, the merchants have told Sita they will not give credit. She doesn’t understand and they will not explain. Is it because their father is not a local, because he’ll move on? But he’s been here a year and is posted here one year more, long enough, certainly, to have established a reputation.

Sita had pooh-poohed the merchants, rudely and with dignity. She bought supplies with the ten rupees Sivakami had slipped her; she had splurged, believing her father would want nothing but the best. She was right; he does want nothing but the best. But he clearly had forgotten to give her more money—poor man, she thinks, so much on his mind and now his household has doubled in size. She decided to remind him, show how willing and able she is to take over running the household.

While serving him his afternoon coffee, she asks, “Can I give the houseboy a shopping list, Appa? Will you give me money to give him?”

He looks at her as though he doesn’t know who she is and how she came to be in his house. “Money?”

“For groceries, Appa, we need some—”

“Management, management!” He raps his knuckles hard and humorously on her noggin. She winces. He winks. “What have I been keeping you at your grandmother’s for, if you still do not know how to manage money?”

“I...” She thinks she does know how to manage money, but she is probably wrong. That was Vairum’s house, an upside-down world, everything wrong. She needs to learn things again.

“Payday is Thursday.” She beams, but he is looking elsewhere. “Thursday I will bring home such food as you have never seen, squashes and cucumbers and sweets, yes?”

She happily claps her hands and retires to the kitchen.

The following evening, Janaki and Kamalam are sitting on the veranda. They forget the palanguzhi board between them when they see their father appear on the seat of a bullock cart. Radhai, who has been watching covetously, seizes a handful of cowries. Kamalam grabs her wrist but then releases it as Goli shouts, “Come! Come!”