The Toss of a Lemon (71 page)

Janaki is next to the window with Baskaran beside her so that no other man will sit next to her. Baskaran grubs in the left-hand pocket of his kurta and holds its contents out to her until she accepts. He boldly brushes her hand as she pulls it away.

It is a package, no bigger than her palm: slightly heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She tugs at the coarse bow. It comes loose, and the soft thick paper opens to reveal a box of worked silver in the shape of a parrot.

Seeing it stirs some dim memory in her that she can’t quite bring into focus. It’s so touching that he planned a gift; what a shame it’s so ugly. The bird looks vulgar and ill-intentioned. Perhaps parrots are not suited to being rendered in silver, she thinks.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“It’s beautiful,” she responds.

He gestures. “Open it.”

She lifts off the lid, which fits onto the bottom half by means of a latticework border. Inside is a small sack and, inside the sack, glossy peppermints in pink and white stripes.

“Take one,” he urges, but she thinks they look too lovely to eat, and she feels so shy. She imagines playing palanguzhi, Kamalam’s favourite game, with him, using pink and white peppermints for tokens.

She hands back the bird-shaped box, indicating Baskaran should offer the mints around the compartment. He tries and is ignored by the others, who are shouting now, evenly divided on a number of related political topics. Finally, he takes a mint, presses it into her mouth and chucks her lightly under the chin. Taking another candy for himself, he sits back to enjoy her discomfort.

MUCHAMI FINISHES PUTTING AWAY THE BULLOCK and cart and comes through the courtyard toward the kitchen door, carrying Raghavan, who is nearly asleep. Sivakami is in the pantry, reading her Ramayana, only her forehead and hands visible above the book. The older children have scattered. Muchami calls out softly, “Amma?” then goes back around to pass through the back room, then the room under the stairs, into the main hall.

Sivakami lays a mat down in the main hall. Muchami deposits the little boy on it, and Raghavan rolls luxuriantly onto his side, already asleep.

Sivakami and Muchami take their separate paths, she through the kitchen, he through the other passage, out to the courtyard, where Muchami draws some water. He washes his feet, face, neck and hands, and takes a long drink.

“Everything went all right?” Sivakami asks from the small veranda at the back of the house.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “Janaki’s a good girl, very smart girl.”

“Yes,” Sivakami says. “They’re all good.”

“I will miss her more than the elder ones,” he says, a little apologetically, “and probably more than the younger ones, too.”

“Sure, who will practise Sanskrit with you?”

Muchami laughs. “She surpassed me so long ago, she has no use for this old man’s stuttering!” He looks serious again. “Amma ... seeing her in-laws, I couldn’t help thinking again about how Vairum, what he said about how we warned off Goli. Ah, I felt so bad, all over again.”

Sivakami is silent: she had tried to talk to Vairum about that after the wedding was over, but he wouldn’t allow it. “What’s done is done, Muchami. Don’t torture yourself. I wouldn’t even have told you what Vairum said if you hadn’t asked.”

“I should have known.” Muchami hits his head with his fist. “Vairum is also so intelligent. I should have known he would anticipate whatever we could. I was just so concerned for Janaki.”

“Yes, yes.” Sivakami doesn’t see the point of talking about it. They can’t take it back and they’ll never do it again. “The point is, she’ll be fine there.”

“I think she will.” His face shines as he thinks of her, all dressed up, with her rich husband. “I think she’ll really do well.”

At the Pandiyoor station, the family’s bullock cart, magnificently decorated and drawn by a majestic and fatty black bull, awaits them. Gopalan, the family’s head servant, is driving. Before he mounts the cart, Baskaran pulls a small tin from the pocket of his kurta, inhales a few pinches of snuff from it, and sneezes. Janaki looks away, wishing she hadn’t seen. He mounts the cart and Gopalan twitches the reins against the bullock’s back.

Leaving the station, they cross a small commercial street and travel past the bus depot and a post office before turning into one of two streets that, intersecting at a T, make up the Brahmin quarter. Single Street, the top of the T, is composed of a row of houses facing the sides of two long houses on Double Street, including Baskaran’s family home. Double Street, the T’s stem, looks more like the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter, with two rows of houses facing each other. On both streets, the houses share walls with their neighbours, the red and white stripes of the verandas, as in Cholapatti, practically continuous. Double Street culminates in a Krishna temple, behind which stretches the Vaigai River.

Almost everyone on the street between the station and the Brahmin quarter recognizes the cart and puts palms together respectfully. Baskaran’s brother gives the expected reaction: sometimes he nods in acknowledgement; mostly he doesn’t react at all. Baskaran, though, puts his own palms together, offering namaskarams to labourers, merchants, a tailor, hardly conventional Brahmin behaviour. Suspicion inkles in Janaki’s breast: she hasn’t married a radical, has she?

Only one of Baskaran’s sisters is at home, the one who married locally. She squeals delightedly, a habit Janaki noticed when they met earlier. The two sisters-in-law are more—what? Reticent or decorous ? Surly or proper? Janaki can’t read them. Vermilion water is swirled; songs sung. The bride and groom are instructed to step up onto the threshold with their right feet. Janaki, looking down, watches her own foot, hennaed in dots and lines, entering her real and forever home in unison with the wide, pale foot of the husband who brought her here.

Her mother-in-law has stood for the occasion and waits inside, Dhoraisamy tittering and bobbing beside her. Baskaran and Mrs. Baskaran prostrate themselves before the household elders.

Her sisters-in-law indicate that they will show Janaki around while her luggage is brought in, and Baskaran goes off to bathe. Janaki turns and, without thinking, blurts words of caution about her veena. She receives a look of pained hauteur from Gopalan in return—a servant of his calibre needs no such instruction. She cringes, but is also reassured.

The house is two or three times the size of the one she grew up in. The ground floor has not only a veranda and anteroom leading into the main hall from the street, but a front study that corresponds to the anteroom, with a desk on which are neatly arranged a blotter, pen and paperweights. Tidily labelled ledgers bound in red or brown leather line a rotating rosewood bookshelf beside it. After a peep into the study, Janaki is led back through the main hall and into a small extra room, lit by two windows that give onto yet another room. The windows have no panes, bars, or shutters, but they are a bit too high to see through, the bottom edge at the level of Janaki’s brow. Vasantha, the elder sister-in-law, explains in a low tone that this is the women’s room. It contains untidy piles of tatting and embroidery, magazines and novels, a harmonium and now her veena still within its jute wrappings. Swarna nods nervously and whispers, “We spend time here, you see—when we’re not doing everything else we have to do.” Janaki wonders why they are acting as if this is a secret.

There is a communicating door between the windows, and she is led to it but stopped before she goes through. There, she is surprised to see Senior Mami, her mother-in-law, in a bright room barely wider than the good lady herself, about three times as long as it is wide. It contains a radio, a gramophone, a floor desk, two more bookshelves fully stocked with books and a cot, currently containing Senior Mami, who is reading what appears to be a religious commentary. Janaki sees that, among the pride of children following them on the tour, only one aggressive two-year-old still needs to be told not to enter their grandmother’s lair.

The set-up seems regal or Muslim, somehow, with its hierarchies and its rigorous division of the masculine and feminine. This impression is assisted by the fine latticework that covers the windows of Senior Mami’s room. Such fashions are rare in areas such as this, where Muslim emperors never really gained a toehold. Here, the ruling classes are likelier to ape the British, a less threatening practice, as far as Janaki is concerned.

Janaki tries to look coolly appreciative as, inwardly, she frets—could such details possibly be in accordance with the Shastras’ dictates on construction? She takes a deep breath and doesn’t think about it. Doorways are lined up from front to back in two rows—that’s one Shastric prescription she does know about. She can see clear from the door of her mother-in-law’s zenana entrance, through the women’s room, into the extra room, into the puja room, the pantry, the kitchen, straight out into the garden, whence wafts the smell of curry leaf, jasmine, tulsi. Janaki exhales. She’s imagining—she couldn’t smell all that from here. But she can see a patch of green. Everything will work out.

They pass back through the great hall and mount the stairs to the next storey, where each brother has a chamber that he shares with his wife. Janaki and Baskaran are in the last. Her luggage is already there, between the double bedstead and
almirah.
The windows are hung with strung flowers in what strikes her as a Rajasthani fashion. Her sisters-in-law, who probably hung the flowers, giggle nastily and Janaki’s flushing shyness turns to annoyance. She thinks to shoot them a look but stops herself. Janaki had very much hoped to find things in common with these girls. Observing them now, she feels homesick.

Vasantha and Swarna attack her luggage, searching out a fresh sari, blouse and undergarments so Janaki will not contaminate her things by touching them before she has had her bath. They swarm like ants over a torn-open package of candy, appraising her bodices with the lace straps and trim she crocheted herself, putting her saris in order of their preference, yanking out sheets, hairpins, cooking vessels. The entertainment is too soon concluded and Janaki senses, astonished, that she has come up short. Her trousseau is the grandest and most modern that any of Sivakami’s granddaughters has had—Janaki had felt both embarrassed and proud at its opulence. But Vasantha and Swarna are rich girls, raised for boredom and discontent.

Janaki’s things have been left in heaps and tangles, but she doesn’t mind—organizing will be something to do. She follows her sisters-in-law as they descend the stairs with the outfit they have selected for her. Gopalan is in the hallway when they reach the bottom, gathering some sacks and a basket to do the evening marketing. At the sight of the new daughter-in-law, the head servant’s chiselled features turn stony. Janaki feels scraped by his expression: she can’t be working to ingratiate herself with the servants, but it would be nice to be liked, if not respected. Or perhaps respected, if not liked. She didn’t mean to offend him with her instruction. Isn’t he employed to take orders?

Fuming, she is led to the back of the courtyard and shown the bathroom. Her sisters-in-law hang her clothes and towel on a rod that extends from wall to wall, and leave her to marvel. The bathroom is three times the size of theirs in Cholapatti, with a slanting tiled roof and sunlight streaming in the gap between roof and walls. She removes the small clay plate covering the mouth of the enormous curved brass pot on a woodstove. Using a small brass jug as a dipper, she fills a cylindrical pot sitting on the floor. Her bad temper is rinsed into the gutter with the first sluice of hot water. The servants probably build the fire even before the family rises, she thinks. And my
sisters-in-law
take it
for granted.

She opens her soap and turmeric dish and rubs her skin until it smarts red beneath its veneer of gold. She is already quite fair and hairless, and she wants to stay that way. She washes her travelling clothes, wrings them and sets them on a high shelf.

After having drawn the bath out as long as she can, she combs, braids and ties up her hair and dresses with care in a dusty-rose sari with burgundy stripes and border. She has been wearing a nine-yard sari since she got married, several months now, but is still not yet entirely comfortable wrapping herself. She puts on her new wristwatch—her first, another item in her trousseau, with a slim, octagonal face and slithery metal band—and checks the time: 1:35. Her edges and rims still glowing bright yellow from the turmeric, she emerges fresh and dressed, and newly cautious. She hangs her clean clothes to dry. Seeing the household’s tulsi plant, the holy basil to which housewives pray daily, growing from a vermilion-anointed stand in the courtyard, she does an obeisance for it. As she does so, she hears the sound of chanting from next door—Yajur Veda. A master sings out and young boy voices chime back.

This must be the paadasaalai, she realizes, the Vedic school Baskaran’s family has charge of. It is one branch of the charity established by Dhoraisamy’s uncle, who had accumulated a fortune as a moneylender but had no child to whom he could leave it. He had bought the house next door as a venue for the school. The little boys must take their lessons in the courtyard, under a tree, perhaps, in the traditional style, Janaki thinks, lingering to listen to the pleasing, timeless sound. She can see the top of a tree, over the wall that separates the two courtyards.