The Toss of a Lemon (70 page)

Vairum glares at them, his nostrils flaring above his wide moustache. “Go on, eat!”

Janaki smiles at him and eats a pinch of green mango with salt and lemon. Vairum points at her rice; she shakes her head.

There is a silence between the men for a time, then Vairum breaks it. “Delicious. Please tell your wife.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Sirajudeen says without looking at any of them, and then changes the subject.

“That was a mistake,” Vairum expostulates as he slams his car door. “I thought you might not humiliate me in front of my good friend, but, no—you’re worse than your grandmother! You’re part of a new generation. Freedoms, to know people, to travel—does this mean nothing to you?”

Again, Janaki can’t think of any response and doesn’t think Vairum wants one. Would he really have her turn her back on all the values of her childhood?

“Answer me,” he bellows, and she jumps.

“I ... I owe Amma my life,” she says. She has never said it aloud, but she knows it to be true.

“Many people have given you many things,” he says pointedly, and she blushes, thinking of her wedding, “but your life is your own now”.

Janaki thinks this is a very strange notion: she belonged to her family, who kept her in trust to give to her husband. Since when does anyone invent their own values? She is getting a very strange feeling from her uncle.

“We don’t have to live as Brahmins have for eight thousand years.” He sighs hard and looks out the window. “Don’t you like the excitement of the city, the sense of possibility?”

“Yes, Vairum Mama,” she quickly replies, but he doesn’t look at her and she is left to her thoughts. Eight thousand years. She can’t fathom it. She thinks of the day each year when a family honours its dead and tries to imagine eight thousand years of grandparents, but the only foremother she has really known is her amma, and she is not sorry she honoured her by refusing food in the Muslim’s house, though she will never tell Sivakami about the incident. She was sorry to hurt Mr. Sirajudeen’s feelings—he seemed like a nice man. But what did he expect, really? She feels a pang of homesickness and then starts to worry: Vairum invited her for this holiday so that she’ll fit into her husband’s family better. Will this kind of thing be expected of her in her new home?

Vairum no longer feels like touring sites with them. He has the driver drop him at his office and take the girls to the church and temple by themselves. The church is wondrous and unfamiliar, and the temple magnificent and comforting. They return home in good spirits. Vairum is out, and won’t return until late, so they have tiffin alone with Vani.

Janaki had not been sure whether Vani would keep up her storytelling habit throughout her time in Madras—what does she do when Vairum is not at home for a meal, tell the tales to the cook? During their visit, though, Vani spins her old magic, telling a story of a young woman, a relative of hers, whose husband passed away while she was pregnant. The child, however, grew, as did his elder brothers, to look uncannily like the dead husband: his features, his voice, his manner. Soon they took over the running of the household just as her husband had done, while she, grown dim in age, forgot her tragedy and thought her husband returned to her, multiply. Although the men married, she never recognized their wives.

Today, the story changes, and the child dies at birth. The husband, traumatized, regresses, becoming more and more childlike with the years, and the wife plays along, becoming, in increasing degrees, like a mother to him. Their elder sons, though, come with time to look and sound just like the man their father once was, and she finds them wives who agree to dress the same as her, as well as adjusting their hair and manner to imitate her own. The story ends with both wives pregnant.

Janaki is disturbed. There is a strange light in her aunt’s eye, an intensity to her telling, in the reversal, that makes the story sound less like the entertaining and impersonal mysteries Janaki remembers and more like an allegory of the psyche.

She has been preoccupied, since that night at Adyar Beach, with Vani’s childlessness and with her isolation with Vairum here in Madras. She is increasingly convinced that this is an unnatural way to live: no parents, no children, no relatives nor even neighbours of their own caste and community, meeting strangers every day, strangers who want something. Vairum seems so enamoured of this loneliness and anonymity, but now Janaki is fearful of what it is doing to their aunt, and maybe even to their uncle.

She knows Vani grew up in a sophisticated household, but also that she had thrived, as much as the grandchildren had, in the order of their Cholapatti home. Her affection and regard for Sivakami was visible. With children and neighbours, she was never alone, even when Vairum was away overnight. Maybe Vairum thinks Thangam’s children reminded Vani of the baby they lost, but what if it was better for her, not having a child of her own, to be surrounded by children? She had always been eccentric but had seemed content. Now she crackles with some weirdness. Kamalam, too, has noticed it.

“Vani Mami is not happy,” she tells Janaki tonight, as they take out the postcards they bought that day.

Janaki nods. “I know. I’m not even sure she’s well.”

There is little more they can say: what can they do, two young girls? Whom would they tell? They trade off the postcards, writing notes to Sivakami, Muchami and Gayatri, about the sights and wonders of the city by the sea.

They have four days left, which pass without major incident. A trip to Madras Beach, where they eat roasted corn and take in such curiosities as a two-headed girl in a boxlike theatre; another ice cream at the Presidency Club, where Vairum plays tennis. One evening, Janaki, inspired by the Punjabi woman, crushes henna leaves from the garden into the finest paste she can, and extrudes it from a paper roll onto Kamalam’s hands. On one hand, she does a pattern of lotuses and mango leaves; on the other, a zigzag, replicating the pattern on the souvenir shells they took from Adyar Beach. Vairum laughs when he sees her art, so different from the large, crude dots that are customary in the south. “So you are capable of departing from tradition!”

Janaki laughs, too.

“Do Vani’s hands also, why don’t you?” he asks.

Tickled, she agrees.

On their last evening, Janaki reminds Vairum that he had wanted to hear them read from the English book. Kamalam had begged her not to bring it up, but Janaki felt it was an obligation, and welcomed the challenge, so like school. She missed school terribly. Kamalam didn’t. Janaki has also started inserting, from time to time, an English word in her speech, though she blushed a little when Kamalam looked at her quizzically.

“Ah, it’s all right,” Vairum says, waving them off. “I’m sure you’ve learned many things no book will ever tell you.”

The three look at one another sombrely, knowing each takes away very different impressions of this holiday, though these impressions are, nonetheless, shared.

Vairum had planned to drive them back to Cholapatti but must attend to a water dispute that is turning ugly and affects several of his concerns. He asks if they might be able to take the train. The couple who cook for him are due for a trip home; he’ll give them leave to escort them. The girls tell him it will be fine.

The platform at Egmore Station is crowded with people fleeing the city for the villages, against rumours of attacks. Though the girls are fearful, Vairum looks at the hordes with something like disdain.

“No one will ever target Madras. It seems big to us, but it’s a backwater in the world,” he says, rolling his eyes and looking as if he wishes this weren’t so.

Still, for every reason, Janaki and Kamalam are glad to be going home. That morning, a cook had arrived to replace the couple while they were away: a non-Brahmin. Janaki and Kamalam were aghast, though Janaki felt nothing should surprise them any more: now Vani had to eat this kind of food in her own home?

She’s had quite enough of the city. Soon she will be home, and thence to married life. She hopes she is sufficiently prepared.

“SO THE PRETTY YOUNG THINGS HAVE RETURNED, have they?” Gayatri ribs Janaki and Kamalam, who smile back. “How did you enjoy your trip? That was a nice gift, I must say.”

“Yes,” Janaki can agree on that. “It was a nice gift.”

“Did you enjoy?” Gayatri prods. “What is their house like?”

“The house is very nice,” Janaki says. “Modern, you know: modern stove, divans. Indoor toilet! So different. City life.”

“Mm-hm,” Gayatri frowns. “Almost too much, sometimes, no?”

“I enjoyed the holiday,” Janaki insists. “Certainly, for two weeks, it was excellent. I’m not sure I would want to live in Madras.”

“Oh, yes, I understand.” Gayatri smiles, patronizing and warm. Janaki remembers hearing that her family was one of the first in the town of Kulithalai to install an indoor toilet. “Well, that’s not too likely. I suppose, after a time, one just wants one’s home, isn’t it true?”

“I suppose.” Janaki blushes.

“Not too long now, is it?” Gayatri leans forward a little. “Just a couple of months, and then you’re off to your husband’s! Your real home.”

Her real home. After all these years of feeling she was living on credit—not just because she is a girl, but because she was being raised in her mother’s natal home—Janaki is departing for the place where she truly belongs. She has been in safekeeping all these years, for this family she will now join.

Vairum and Vani were to have taken her to Pandiyoor by car but, at the last minute, a business crisis prevents Vairum from coming. There are not many male relatives appropriate to take his place: Murthy has grown increasingly dishevelled since Rukmini died, Janaki’s brothers are unmarried; Sivakami’s brothers are dead, and Vairum never liked to ask them for favours in any case. Instead, in a radical departure from tradition, he arranges for Baskaran to come and fetch his bride himself. Sivakami finds the plan disturbingly casual, and insists they will have at least a ceremonial handing-over, even if it takes place three steps from the veranda. She recalls that Thangam’s in-laws came for her, but circumstances were such then that she didn’t want to draw attention to the matter.

Janaki doesn’t feel undervalued by the change in plans; on the contrary, it flatters her that Baskaran is willing to come himself. But the unconventionality worries her in the way that every departure from tradition does. On her last night within these borrowed walls, Janaki frets: will she measure up? Their trip to Madras made her feel more sheltered than ever. She lies awake, holding Kamalam’s hand. Kamalam squeezes back, her face against Janaki’s shoulder, crying silently.

The next morning, upon seeing Baskaran, with a brother and one of Vani’s lawyer uncles, ready to escort her, she relaxes. His smile for her is reassuring.

She takes leave of her grandmother, prostrating for her as Baskaran bows, palms together, at her side. She does the same for the Ramar. She hugs Kamalam, wiping tears from both their cheeks, saying she’ll be back soon for a visit, not to worry. “Or you can come to visit me there! Please don’t cry.” Radhai, Krishnan and Raghavan come along to the station.

At the Kulithalai station, she is packed into a train compartment by Muchami and Baskaran, as carefully as she packed her trunks. Radhai and her brothers kiss her, and Muchami smiles at her long and affectionately, a smile she returns rather more quickly, with a little puzzlement at his apparent sentimentality. He holds the children back from the platform and they wave until the train is out of sight.

ON THE TRAIN, Baskaran’s brother and cousin bury themselves in newspapers and lift their heads only to engage in heated debate with their compartment-mates on the subject of India’s entry into the war on the British side: was independence worth such a sacrifice of lives and integrity?