The Toss of a Lemon (56 page)

Sita doesn’t turn to look at her siblings but feels their alkaline shock neutralized by her stinging helplessness.

Nine o’clock sees them trooping out the door. Thangam sits in the large room, by the exit, clutching Krishnan and Radhai. She is holding Radhai so tightly, in fact, that the child keeps trying to squirm out of her pale-knuckled grasp. As each of the older children files past, he or she drops a kiss on Thangam’s powdery skin. She says nothing, nor even moves, but looks long and almost sullenly on each. Only as the last one leaves, a gold-flecked tear trails down her cheek.

Sita wonders why Goli couldn’t give her grocery money yet can pay for their tickets back to Cholapatti, but decides it’s not her problem. He strolls whistling from the bus stop toward the station, the snuff pocket of his kurta jangling. Each child carries some baggage or bedding, since Goli has arranged no bullock cart for them, nor have they seen the houseboy more than twice in the week since they arrived.

A shrivelled, cackling man waves bunches of faded paper pinwheels at everyone hurrying into the station. Goli tosses a rupee coin at him. The old fellow catches it with startling ease as Goli relieves him of the entire bunch, distributing one each to his faithless children and the remainder magnanimously among all the children in sight. The old man wanders off elated—a rupee is many times more than that bunch was worth. Kamalam had already been struggling under her baggage allotment and is a sad sight, trying to carry the pinwheel as well.

A freak of architecture has created a gale force wind in the doorway to the station. As the children pass through the vacuum, the curved petals of each of their pinwheels rip free of their moorings, so that the pointy ends dangle like seaweed out of water.

The four children approach the platform while Goli buys their tickets. One by one, they toss their pinwheels onto the track. May as well have saved the effort and just put the coin on the rails for the train to flatten, Sita thinks morosely. Three of the pinwheels lie limp and motionless, and the fourth rotates in futile quarter-turns, one direction, then the other, back, back again, until a beggar child wanders up the track and urinates on it.

The tickets are two and a half rupees each, ten rupees for the four children, just the amount Sita used to feed the whole family for the ten days that the experiment lasted. Goli gets a ticket for himself, too.

Their baggage is stowed and they are on their way. Goli is in a gleeful mood, buying snacks, cracking jokes, making a party with everyone in the compartment. Isn’t this fun, his attitude seems to say. Charming man with his four beautiful children, off for a holiday. Listening to him speak to other passengers, the children learn he had had a good night at the club—another source of supplemental income, though this pursuit is often as expensive as it is profitable.

In the spirit of a game he asks his children, “What if ... I were murdered? What if someone got on at the next stop and stabbed me dead, right here and now?”

They look like a naive painting of dismayed witnesses to a crime, their faces yet without depth or perspective. Smiles wiggle nervously on all their faces except Kamalam’s, who starts to cry. Maybe on account of the fleeting thought that, scary as it sounds, she might be happier if he were dead. Her tears attract Goli’s attention.

He asks sympathetically, “Missing Vairum Mama?” and slides down the wooden seat, shoving Janaki and Sita along and knocking Laddu off the end. Now he is across from Kamalam, her face filling his vision as he leans in closer and closer, head cocked like a father crow’s. “I only let you all live with him because he can’t have children of his own.”

Closer.

“He can’t have kids.”

Kamalam is looking down. She is making an enormous effort at continence but it’s not quite enough: one last slippery tear bubbles out to run over her cheek.

Goli bounds to his feet and roars at the people ramrod still all around the compartment. Chop chop chop chop goes hand against palm.

“He talks against me! He is a stingy coward who can’t have relations with his wife! He tries to steal my children! He talks against me !”

Kamalam bellows through her weeping, her eyes still shut, “Don’t talk about my uncle that way!”

Goli leaps over and hits her.

He stands and fumes at the door as the train pulls into a station. He gets out and paces around the platform, then buys fifty packages of snacks from another vendor who looks as if he hasn’t had a sale all year. Goli throws them through the windows at everyone in the compartment, telling them to eat. Janaki hands one to her little sister, who will not take it. Janaki puts it in her lap. There the package sits untouched until Laddu points at it. She nods faintly. He eats it with alacrity.

Goli is strutting up and down, stuffing a couple of packages of the stale, greasy bits into his mouth. Like an aristocratic host at a royal banquet, he is aggressively hospitable, ordering everyone to eat. The new people in the car smile at his neighbourliness, his good spirit, and their mood affects even those who were present before, as they and the children nibble the age-old snacks. Janaki offers some of her own to Kamalam, who doesn’t respond. There are finger marks on Kamalam’s pale cheek.

In the city, their father puts them on the train bound for Kulithalai. He bids farewell to all of his good friends from the compartment and now to his children. He has business to which he must attend.

They reach Cholapatti slightly after sunset. Not knowing how to tell their grandmother or Muchami of their arrival, they walk home from the station, dragging bags, bedding, bottoms. Sivakami looks them over anxiously but asks no questions. Vairum, when he sees them, takes a breath as though to say something, but Sivakami raises a hand, and he keeps silent.

Late that night, Sita, Laddu and Janaki all rise with terrible diarrhea. Only Kamalam sleeps soundly.

GOLI AND THANGAM MOVE EVEN FARTHER AWAY in 1935, and then, in 1937, close enough that Thangam can consider coming to Cholapatti for Pongal, the January harvest festival. She is four months pregnant and, at Sivakami’s suggestion, agrees to stay until her delivery. Her health is waning; she lost a baby two years earlier while stationed too distant from Cholapatti to come and receive the benefit of Sivakami’s lucky hands. Krishnan, now a rambunctious three-year-old, needs companions to exhaust him, Sivakami believes. Sita, recently married, is preoccupied with her imminent departure for her husband’s home, and Laddu has been given a job at a oil-processing plant Vairum is about to open. The younger sisters, however—Janaki, twelve, full of unspent creative energies; Kamalam, a sweet and pliant nine-year-old; and Radhai, an indefatigable six—welcome their little brother with the aggressive delight of children who don’t have enough to divert them.

Goli brings Thangam, along with a business proposition, he tells his mother-in-law. They have arrived mid-afternoon, after six hours’ travel. Thankfully, the weather is temperate at this time of year, and though it’s the hottest part of the day, it is only about twenty-eight degrees outside. Still, Thangam, exhausted, is settled on a quilt to rest.

“Vairum is in Madras at present,” Sivakami informs her son-in-law, “though we expect him back tonight. You know he does so much of his business there, now, he has even bought a house. He is there two or three days every week. Will you have coffee?”

“Yes, of course.” Goli leaps to his feet. “You tell him to wait for me—when is it?”

“He gets back, I don’t know, tonight some time,” Sivakami repeats, unsure if he has said he wants coffee.

“... if he wants to make a deal.” Goli has exited.

Sivakami sighs, unable to decide whether she should pass on the message. There’s no guarantee that Goli has anything to offer that Vairum would want, and the chances of his returning the next day are so uncertain. After the previous fiasco, why try again? Goli ran his cinema into the ground within a year, Vairum told her.

She decides to ask Muchami what the chances are that Vairum would simply catch wind of whatever it is Goli wants of him.

“Oh, don’t worry, Amma,” Muchami tells her as he supervises the replacement of some bricks in the floor of the main hall. “No doubt the son-in-law will show up at the clubhouse tonight to play cards. The son-in-law will talk about his business as he plays and I will find out. When Vairum returns tonight, he will have to meet with his manager about the plant opening tomorrow, so word may reach him of the son-in-law’s business, but if Vairum doesn’t find out what is happening before me, I will tell him first thing tomorrow. Okay? Taken care of.”

If Sivakami were still looking, she would have seen Muchami’s reassuring smile fade as he turns back to his work. Muchami doesn’t know what Goli plans on proposing to Vairum, but a few weeks ago an old Cholapatti acquaintance of Goli’s had asked Muchami to give Goli a message: Goli, she said, owed her money. This was not someone who had bought a deer’s head, though the debt dated to that period. It was the devadasi. Muchami had had to ask Vairum’s assistance, being unable to write himself and wanting to keep the contents of the message within the family. The letter had probably prompted this visit and spurred an even greater than usual desire in Goli for some fast cash.

Muchami finishes his work with all the appearance of calm. His next chore is to whitewash the upstairs rooms. It is the season; the relatively cool, damp weather helps the whitewash to cure and so every house on the Brahmin quarter undergoes this makeover in preparation for the harvest festival. When Muchami finishes, around five-thirty, Vairum still hasn’t returned. Muchami goes home, and after a bath and his evening meal, goes out again. He had had thoughts, anyway, of going out that night on a personal errand, the sort he still runs occasionally. He stops by the Kulithalai clubhouse on his way and makes a pretense of buying a bottle of goli choda, a lime-flavoured carbonated drink. Muchami hates the stuff but pops the wax seal on the glass marble stopper, and pretends to drink, just outside the door, where he can listen to the men inside.

The next day, Janaki arrives at school before Bharati. When Bharati shows up and takes her seat at their shared school bench, Janaki makes the signal that is shorthand for their latest big joke, something to do with their maths sir’s stooped posture. Today, Bharati doesn’t laugh, not even a snort, but stares straight ahead. Janaki looks at her in concern. Bharati turns as though she is going to ask Janaki a painful question, and enjoy asking it. Then their maths sir enters, loping under the burden of his body. The girls face forward in silence, looking down at the slates in their laps.

Their silence lasts until eleven-thirty, when their lunch gang joins them, pulling other benches over to form a triangle where the five meet daily. Bharati, of whom they are all afraid, narrows her fish-shaped eyes—liquid brown irises, whites shot with blood in the manner of classical beauties—and tells them, “Go away.”

They all stop. She says again, “Eat somewhere else today.” They back away without question.

Janaki asks, “What is wrong?”

Bharati freezes a look on Janaki and asks in a voice glittering darkly, “Why don’t you ask our father?”

Janaki doesn’t understand this, nor does she know how to reply.

Bharati replies for her. ‘ “
Our
father, what do you mean our father?’ Oh, I was surprised, too, let me tell you. Turns out your dad and my mother were friendly way back, before my mother met the man I’ve called Appa all these years. He’s a Brahmin, too, a freedom fighter, a Congressman, and now he’s in jail, and can’t give us money like he always has. He’s very honourable,” she says pointedly, so Janaki understands this to be a contrast with Goli. “He got to know my mother just after I was born. Now I know why my younger sisters don’t look much like me! Anyway, now my mother told your father it’s time he chips in, and he thinks he can sweet-talk and bully my amma into letting him off the hook.” Bharati leans in close. “It’s the age of Kali, my grandmother says: the brave are in jail and cowards walk free.”

Janaki is trembling. She still doesn’t understand much except that her family’s honour is at stake. She points at her friend. “You are the coward. You are so full of lies you wouldn’t know the truth if it punched you in the nose.”

And then she punches her friend in the nose. Bharati comes at Janaki, scratching her temple and cheek. Janaki hits at her, and Bharati grabs her by the hair saying, again in that voice like mica, “Where does your father go at night, if you know so much?”

The other children have collected in a wide circle around them. Janaki is slap-scratching anything within reach but replies reasonably, because she knows the answer. “He goes to the club.”

Bharati tosses her to the packed-earth floor and hisses, “Where does he go after the club?”

Janaki is weeping. Bharati walks away. As the teachers hurry over, Janaki yells, “I don’t even know where your house is.”