The Toss of a Lemon (63 page)

Vairum runs back up the road without a word to them. He passes his mother and tells her, “She is there—go up the road, you will see the house. I’m going to fetch help.”

He swims back across with the parasal, faster than riding in it. The villagers take a collective step back as he ascends the bank before them like a minor god and sets off in the direction of the rail station.

Sivakami places her feet carefully in the streaming road. She looks up to see where she must go and staggers, firebursts of fear in her tired eyes: here is Kali, goddess of destruction, her hair loose and rising about her, mouth open—Kali, running on water, bounding death.

No, it’s Janaki. Just a little girl, helpless and scared, her hair streaming. What is she, after all, just fourteen? Fourteen years old. She is crying with sadness because her mother is dying, and with relief, even joy, because now she can say so. The world still exists; they didn’t abandon her.

Her loose hair is stuck to her face and as Sivakami clears it from her mouth, Janaki suddenly becomes conscious of it and binds the ends together. Sivakami squeezes Janaki’s arms, pats her back. They walk back together, Janaki holding her grandmother’s arm. Once, Sivakami slips on the sliding invisible earth and Janaki steadies her.

Sivakami knows none of the people in the house, but she does not resent them. Sickness always draws a crowd. A pathway through the mass appears for her and at its end, the waxy blue figure of her daughter. Sivakami strokes Thangam’s cheeks as though drawing out sadness, kisses her fingers where they touched her daughter and asks, “Enn’idhu, kanna?”

What is it, dear one? What brought you to this pass?

Janaki moves to a corner and slumps down, cradled by two walls and the floor. She thinks her grandmother and mother, alone in the nattering crowd, look like an island in the Kaveri, a still, holy place in the mad rushing river. Her neck softens and she drops into sleep.

Some three hours later, a beefy white face appears in the door. Everyone stops talking. Many are trying to remember whether they owe taxes.

But he is not a revenue officer, he is the district medical officer whom Vairum has fetched, along with two junior doctors to assist. Three white doctors, everyone whispers. This is the kind of influence Vairum exerts now. Such doctors come with strings attached: Vairum has evidently pulled some.

The DMO asks that everyone clear out. They laugh at his excellent Tamil and go, except Sivakami, who refuses to leave her daughter alone with these strange men. She resists efforts at persuasion, saying, “I know: they are doctors. They are good men, and they have come a great distance, but anything they have to do, they can do in my presence.”

Vairum takes her aside and explains to her that she is an ignorant woman and the doctors need freedom to work. Sivakami says nothing, her lips set as tight as if sealed with wax, and finally, for the first time, his logic and will are bettered by her determination.

The DMO nods, impatient. “It’s fine, sir, please. I can do the work with the lady present, as long as she doesn’t interfere. I quite understand.” He waves Vairum out the door.

Several neighbours try to rouse Janaki to come out with them. She resists unconsciously. Her eyelids twitch and she mumbles but does not awaken. They shake her, speak gently, then fiercely, until Sivakami says, “Leave her. She’s not in the way.” She looks to the DMO, her ally. He nods resignedly. So Janaki remains, a crumpled pile of hair and clothes, in the corner.

The nurse from up the road arrives, looking very hastily washed and combed, though it is approaching eleven o’clock. Her lethargy is legendary. Vairum had rapped on her door and called for her as he and the doctors waded up the road from the crossing point: the DMO had asked for a nurse and she is the only one, locally.

The DMO asks Sivakami to put some water on to boil. She does, compliant but suspicious, as the nurse, shaking her head, closes the bottoms of the shutters against the many who watch unashamedly from without. The DMO checks Thangam’s pulse again and turns apologetically to Sivakami to explain, in his blocky, grammatical Tamil, “I must now check on the baby. I, have, concerns.”

Sivakami squints in incomprehension then closes her eyes when she understands. No one in their family has ever been seen by a doctor. She knows there are woman doctors for women patients, but it’s too late to get one. She knows she cannot interfere and knows it doesn’t matter, that Thangam will not have to account for this loss of modesty.

The DMO checks: there is no sign of dilation. The instruments are boiled. He performs a Caesarean.

A girl. Big. Blue. Dead. Gently and with regret, they hand her to her grandmother. The child’s blue lips are sealed stubborn and resistant in a frozen face. Sivakami looks deep into the lost eyes of her daughter’s last child. She thinks she sees a gold band around the pupil narrow, fade to blue, and then to black. Sivakami carries the baby out the back of the tiny house.

After sewing Thangam up, the DMO palpates her throat, feels her forehead, opens her eyelids one at a time and looks into her eyes. He feels she is far away, already. He looks up at Sivakami and asks, “How many children does she have?”

“She has nine children, and five grandchildren.”

“How can it be?” he murmurs, as if kind and gallant. “She looks so young.”

But when he looks back at her, she looks very old. He blinks to clear a film and again she looks terribly young. Tragic, these people. He lifts her lids again and again checks the pulse at her wrist. He is buying time. The other two doctors are waiting for orders.

He says to Sivakami, “I will try,” and reaches for a phial and a needle.

But he is lying. Her illness is serious and, as far as he knows, unnamed. He looks at his eager assistants, who are waiting for some instruction. He believes there is nothing he can do and believes the wee widow watching him knows this, too.

In his professional opinion, he needs to inoculate this dying woman with faith. He is a skeptical Christian but understands these people have their ways. He shakes the phial of saline and tries to think of it as liquid faith. It could work, in this country where so much happens that he cannot explain. He shakes the bottle faster, willing a catalysis within the worthless liquid, imbuing it with that chthonic quantity this woman needs to live. He shakes and shakes—the junior doctors are looking puzzled—shakes—he doesn’t look at Sivakami’s careworn face—shakes—he maintains a look of diagnostic concentration—shakes.

Chime! The clock rings out. The cuckoo pops. One o’clock. The phial takes flight, out of the DMO’s hand, between the inclined heads of the neatly groomed junior doctors, to shatter against the picture of the goddess Saraswati on the wall calendar beside the window.

Janaki sits bolt upright from sleep. She hears her mother make a rattling growl.

Then Thangam is dead.

The tall white doctor opens the door and walks outside, and leans his forehead against a palm. Those who saw him claimed he cried a little, but that makes no sense.

The others cry, then, except Sivakami. She hears the wails of her grandchildren rise and fall in waves. She sees Janaki lower her head in the corner and recognizes, with a stab, that while joy can be shared, grief must be borne alone. She hears little Raghavan begin screaming and thinks,
He must be frightened.
She hears Murthy, gasping, “Gold. She was our pure gold, and we have lost her.”

Sivakami goes to the back to bathe, dousing herself with water head to toe, as one must when a relative dies. As the others follow, she helps the nurse to tidy the room. She wipes the liquid from the face of the goddess of wisdom and music. It looks like tears, or like rosewater sprinkled in worship. Could that elixir have saved Thangam? Doubtful. Sivakami has little faith in medicine. No faith in that stuff she wipes from Saraswati’s cheeks and the crumbling wall and the rain-damp floor.

WHEN MUCHAMI SAW SIVAKAMI and the family off at the train, he did so with some certain knowledge that he would not be seeing Thangam again. Sivakami told him,
The year has arrived,
in the way she sometimes talked to him: as though it were not too different from talking to herself.

The day after they left, Muchami was supervising the gathering of coconuts in Rukmini’s garden. Rukmini and Murthy had recently engaged a new servant and they didn’t trust him not to take a share. A small gang of his youngest relatives kept him company—the youngest sons and eldest grandsons of those boys who guarded Vairum in the days of his earliest persecutions. The children, inspired by a bunch of young coconuts hanging low to the ground, started clamouring for coconut water.

The coconut gatherers were taking a break, squatting in the garden. Muchami asked if he could borrow a scythe. Though a cut above his caste—agricultural labourers, generally handy with the implements of harvest—Muchami is not good with knives. He started lopping off coconut tops, concentrating visibly, his palms sweating. The labourers giggled as he handed the first off to the children, a rough hole hacked off the top, and some of the water spilt. He had just started on the second, determined to give his young cousins this treat himself, when from within the house the grandfather clock struck one o’clock.

Muchami startled. The scythe went awry and split the coconut lengthwise from tip to tip along one side. Falling to the ground, it yawed slightly, water slopping out, tears from a nearly closed eye. Muchami had nicked himself, and tried to staunch his thumb. He didn’t know why the clock should return him to thoughts of Sivakami’s mission, but he had a sudden feeling it was complete.

IN MUNNUR, THE FAMILY PERFORMS Thangam’s last rites. Her body is cremated at a ghat downriver. The cremation grounds attendant, a bored and ill-tempered dwarf, pokes the pyre to ensure thorough incineration. His son, a tall boy, handsome enough to be in movies, assists.

Six priests chant around another fire in the small salon of the last house where Thangam lived. The house is filled with the mournful, waxy smell of things sacrificed to the flames: ghee, holy water, flowers, puffed rice. Thangam’s ashes are gathered, and Laddu, looking solemn and unfamiliar, carries the urn to the river. An entourage surrounds and trails him—his siblings with their spouses and children, Vairum, Vani, Goli, Murthy and Rukmini, Minister and Gayatri, some neighbours.

As Laddu wades out into the current, he stumbles and begins to cry. Behind him, Murthy wails, “We have lost our purest gold, our darling!”

Saradha and Rukmini whimper agreement; Gayatri, her head bowed, stands behind her husband, weeping and not watching. The urn exhales several puffs of ash against the cool light of the season before Laddu tips its contents into the river’s flow.

Sivakami, watching from the bank, recalls the first time she saw Thangam’s strange golden dust silting the narrow gutter that leads from the bath. The dust would shift with the water but was so heavy buckets were needed to move it along into the drain. Now, Thangam’s particulate remains, light as anyone’s, float out and away in seconds. A thin ashen sheet billows in the air before dropping to follow the rest.

Sivakami’s eldest brother died some three years back, but the next two brothers come and observe mourning with the family, repeating, as does Murthy, platitudes on the nobility of Thangam’s death. Sivakami grits her teeth and says nothing. If it were anyone else’s daughter, she would be saying the same sorts of things.

Rukmini tends Krishnan, who, at five, may not be entirely certain what has happened. He has lived with Sivakami since his younger brother’s birth; Sivakami made the argument that Thangam could not handle two boys, and Thangam did not protest. Also, Sivakami believes that boys should be coddled, to give them confidence and a strong feeling of home. Girls don’t need either, she reasons, since they don’t need to meet and do business with the outside world. Because Laddu needed discipline, Sivakami had not been able to indulge him to the degree she would have liked, and fears that, as a result, he may have turned out nervous and remote. Krishnan, a brighter and more sensitive boy, gives her some hope of restitution.

It has been two years since Krishnan last saw Thangam, and as far as Sivakami can tell, he has forgotten her. He spends every day with Rukmini, who is childless and has lived alone with Murthy since her mother-in-law died. The little boy has become the light of her days and their companionship is as intimate as any between mother and child. It pains Sivakami and also makes her glad to see Krishnan so little affected by his mother’s passing.

Raghavan, however, had not been fully weaned when Thangam died. Though he accepts cups of warm, sweetened cow’s milk from his sisters, he sucks on their sleeves and bites their shoulders, crying for comfort they can’t give him.

Janaki feels sad at her mother’s passing, but also guilty. She wonders whether her sisters feel similarly. While they are motherless in a sense, she thinks, their state is not too different from before: they are still reliant on their grandmother, vulnerable to their uncle, suspicious of their father. Janaki and Kamalam still crave physical affection, a craving finally satisfied in the elder sisters now that they have children of their own. Radhai is just now getting too big to sit on Muchami’s knee.