The Toss of a Lemon (72 page)

Apart from the paadasaalai, Vairum had told her in a briefing, the rich and childless uncle had instituted two other major works under the auspices of the Kozhandhaisamy Charitable Trust. One was the
odugal,
a concept new to Janaki. The Vaigai River, which she has yet to see, appeared dry most of the year, though its waters continued to flow just beneath its glittering sandbed. The odugal is a large T-shaped cut, eight feet or so along the top, about twice as long, and a few feet deep, into which the river’s waters spring. Brahmins use the top of the T for their ablutions; the other castes descend the stem downriver of them. The cut needs daily maintenance lest the river’s sands collapse back and fill it in; the charity pays for a servant to come and re-cut it daily. Were it not for this, each man or family would have to dig a separate hole for bathing and water gathering.

The third branch of the charity is the Kozhandhaisamy Chattram, a rest home for Brahmin travellers, in one of the concentric streets around the famous Meenakshi temple in the nearby city of Madurai.

Janaki finds it deeply reassuring that this family, however wealthy, is bound to a trust whose goals are clearly in the service of Brahmin knowledge and prestige.

On her way to the puja room, she glances into the kitchen, expecting that she will see enormous, hurried activity. Feeding a household of over fifteen people, not including servants, must take military-level organization, and she is curious to see how they do it. She is surprised to see just two cooks, an old woman and a young one, making snacks, even though tiffin is to be served in an hour. They nod and put their palms together ingratiatingly and she smiles shyly back. She supposes the mystery will be solved shortly and goes to her prayers.

Arriving in the puja room, she is seized with comfort and reassurance—finally, familiar faces! Some of the gods are in different settings or configurations from those she is used to, their skins or outfits tinted differently from the pictures in Cholapatti—artists will take licence. But they are still her idols: Ganesha, with his fat tummy and encouraging expression; Krishna, with his knowing smile and valiant chest; Lalitha Parameswari, who always promised to guide her when this time came; Lakshmi and Saraswati, money and erudition, the matters that brought her here. Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman ... Gazing at them with compassion and gratitude, she thinks of all they have endured, the private doubts, mental tests, failures, betrayals. And here they are welcoming her, shining and beautiful and so well put together. She performs a sincere series of obeisances and settles to the task of settling herself in.

Or she starts to and then stops. She thinks she should ask whether she is needed. But whom should she ask? Senior Mami, seemingly completely removed from the operation of the household? Her sisters-in-law—where are they? Baskaran is coming into the great hall now from the veranda—perhaps she should ask him. But what’s the protocol in this house for talking to her husband?

He beckons her impatiently from the puja room doorway, where she stands like a golden deer, torn between stillness and flight. Relieved to have a signal, she goes to him and asks in a stage whisper, “What should I do now?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers back. He’s wearing a fresh kurta and dhoti, and a different scent from the one he wore this morning. “Did my sisters-in-law tell you?”

Janaki shrugs uncertainly. She doesn’t think they did.

“Are you hungry?” Baskaran asks with concern. “Tiffin is at three o’clock.”

Janaki shakes her head. “What about—should I be helping to cook?”

“I really have no idea.” He smiles helplessly.

“Where,” she asks, “where is the tiffin being prepared?”

“The paadasaalai kitchen.”

They stand there another moment, perplexed but not willing to part, until Janaki takes matters in hand. “I’ll ask your mother what I should do. I can’t go wrong that way.”

“Yes ...” He purses his lips. “Unless she’s asleep or not in a mood to tell you. Or doesn’t know herself!”

Janaki frowns at him reprovingly as he smiles at her. Are they flirting? How fun! She goes off to find her mother-in-law.

She finds her sisters-in-law first, strewn in the women’s room with their children like more jumbles of fabric and feminine fancy. Janaki doesn’t want to undermine their authority, but neither does she want to address questions to them, especially in hearing or sight of Senior Mami, that really should be put to the matriarch.

But Janaki has not only been raised to please. She has also absorbed—so thoroughly she doesn’t even realize it—the finest points of strategy and diplomacy. She enters the women’s room, greeting her sisters-in-law. She pauses as though to ask them something and then starts gently and advances to the door of Senior Mami’s chamber. Her mother-in-law is semi-recumbent, listening to a radio discourse on Tamil poetry. Janaki addresses her question to the floor. “What work should I be doing now?” she asks with formal respect.

After more than several tense seconds, Vasantha emits a pip of breath and asks, in such a low voice Janaki can hardly make it out, “What were you thinking of doing?”

It’s a risk, but Janaki decides to be honest. “I was thinking of helping in the kitchen or arranging my things.”

After another pause, Swarna suggests, “They might need help in the kitchen.”

“Go and arrange your things,” Senior Mami orders decisively.

“Yes,” replies Janaki with eager obedience.

Crying intermittently, she spends an hour putting the mattress on the bed—a mattress made from the fabric she got in Madras, stuffed with bolls she herself gathered and cleaned—and the sheets on the mattress. She had embroidered the edges of the sheets, even designed the pattern of English flowers. She puts her formal saris in the cupboard with the moth-repellant sachets she sewed from old blouses—she got the recipe for the herbal fillings from a women’s magazine she found at Gayatri’s.

At ten minutes before three o’clock, she descends. Never a trip wasted: she carries her four other everyday saris, two bright and new, two nearly so. She takes them through to the back and uses a pole to hang them in a free space on the sari rod beyond the bathroom.

The men and children are gathering for the meal, seating themselves in the main hall, along with Vasantha, who assists with the children. Senior Mami eats in her room. Swarna indicates that Janaki should follow her, and they go through a door in the courtyard wall, so that they are back of the paadasaalai, where three cooks are arranging serving dishes just behind the kitchen. The daughters-in-law, along with one of the cooks, carry these back to serve: silky idlis and
thayir vadai,
lentil nuggets swimming in creamy yogourt, with mint and coconut chutneys smooth as if made from flower petals. Every day is a festival in this house, Janaki thinks, trying to attune her pace and rhythm to that of her sister-in-law. She even succeeds in fulfilling one strange requirement against her training. Convention has it that anyone serving food must insist on further helpings, until the eater covers his banana leaf with his hands, pleading satiation. Senior Mami has a difficulty the daughters-in-law are charged with correcting, for the sake of her health: she is unable to refuse food or to leave it uneaten. Her daughters-in-law therefore have been instructed by their husbands to find artful ways of limiting her quantities: after she is served a judicious second portion and perhaps a minuscule third, the items are not offered again.

Janaki’s contentment is only slightly dented by Swarna, who suggests Janaki is messily attired, that she doesn’t properly know serving etiquette, that she is moving too slowly or too quickly, until Janaki is in a transport of irritation, and grateful for her grandmother’s training, which enables her to mask her reaction and to feel confident that Swarna is wrong. At 3:45, she eats her own tiffin together with Swarna, while Vasantha serves them.

As she goes, after tiffin, to take up a place in the women’s room, she feels a flash of pride at being so genteel, so protected. Silent and invisible in her passage, just like her grandmother in a way. Sivakami so respects herself that she has almost never been seen on the street after sunrise. Janaki can’t think even of one time (except that time in Munnur, in the rain, but Janaki passes over that quickly). She thinks of the Brahmin women employed in the kitchen. Were they born poor, or did something happen?
God’s grace, that’s all that separates us from life’s humiliations
. If she had chosen the other flower packet, she might not be here. And what if her father had been in charge of getting her married—would she ever have gotten married at all? She wonders what everyone, Kamalam especially, is doing back in Cholapatti.

Her veena is still in its wrappings—her sisters-in-law either are not bold enough for that or not interested.

“Shall I take out the veena?” she asks, again unsure of whom she is asking.

“If you want,” says Vasantha ambiguously.

Janaki glances in at her mother-in-law’s room, but the great woman doesn’t look up from her reading.

Vairum had insisted on having the instrument packed professionally. Still, Janaki couldn’t help fearing for it and so sighs with relief when it is finally unclothed, curving and gleaming in the late-afternoon sun like a cobra ready to be worshipped. “Shall I play?” she asks, not fully confident of the answer. Her sisters-in-law say nothing, but she hears an affirmative grunt from the front room. She tunes, and plays “Sakala Kala Vani” and “Jaggadhodharana,” grateful for the leisure to practise. Her sisters-in-law continue reading and playing with the children, though once, when one of the boys gets noisy, Senior Mami shouts, “Hush, child!” from her hideout.

Janaki has another reason to be glad for moving to Pandiyoor: Vani visits her parents every few months, and Janaki is sure her sporadic lessons will resume. She is particularly hopeful that she will finally learn the Bharatiyar number she first heard on All-India Radio when Vani played her Navaratri concert. Vani’s version of “Chinnan Cheeru Killiyai Kannama,” is becoming famous. She set it to a
ragamalikai
, a garland of ragas, the scale changing with each stanza. There’s talk, Janaki heard at her wedding, of having Vani make a gramophone recording of it.

Janaki concludes her second piece and her eye lights on the harmonium, which looks dusty. It should be covered with a cloth, she thinks, if it’s not going to be cared for. Maybe she can sew a cover for it.

“Whose is that?” she asks politely.

“Mine,” Swarna says.

“Oh, how lovely,” Janaki soldiers on. “Perhaps you could sing something for us?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Swarna smiles sourly. “Perhaps you could.”

Janaki is confused and looks down at her instrument, pretending to examine a string.

“Miss Perfect,” Swarna whispers.

Janaki freezes, not entirely sure she has heard correctly, then hears Baskaran calling her from the main hall. She rises, grateful, with apologetic glances to her sisters-in-law, who ignore her, and takes her leave of Senior Mami.

It’s time for them to pay the first few of the numerous required visits they must make, as a newly married couple, up and down the Brahmin quarter. Out of respect, they will visit Vani’s parents first, their seniormost relatives on the quarter. They walk, slightly apart and not speaking, along Double Street in the direction of the Krishna temple, greeting neighbours on verandas. Vani’s parents’ house is, gratifyingly, not as grand as Janaki’s in-laws’, though it would have cowed her before she was married. The talk is strange and lively. Vani’s father describes recent progress in his attempts to start a school based on his system of calisthenics and Janaki pecks at a silver plate loaded with murrukku and halwa as she eyes a china cabinet stocked with Vani’s mother’s collection of vintage weapons. At one point, the woman runs to it to extract a nineteenth-century French switchblade, whose mechanism she demonstrates with a cackle.

Janaki, dismayed, checks her watch surreptitiously. She inquires politely about Vani and receives an earful, including the welcome news that Vani will visit next month.

At eight-thirty, the evening repast is served in Dhoraisamy’s household, a simple meal. Janaki, after having visited three homes in which she was rigorously required to snack, wants nothing but a little yogourt rice. She and Baskaran are seated together and served by the sisters-in-law, one of the few nods to tradition in this otherwise unconventional first day. After today, Baskaran will eat with the men and Janaki with the women.

When the meal is done, the cooks of the house proper pour sweet hot milk with boiled almonds into silver tumblers, inverting a bowl on top, then turning them both so the bowl can be carried by its lip. Vasantha carries one to their father-in-law while Swarna carries another to Senior Mami. The brothers are chatting in the main hall. The children are asleep in various places. There is an ayah and a servant to keep track of them whenever a mother is not available. Each of the wives then takes a tumbler of milk and ascends to her bedchamber. The husbands shortly follow.

Janaki sits on the bed, scared once again. Unlike city girls, she knows how babies are made. And she is sharp, so when she overhears things, she puts the two and two together. But knowing the facts of life doesn’t prepare a person for living.

Baskaran looks down as he enters, glances up, then down, and smiles a little. He closes the door, fumbles the bolt closed and closes the shutters on that side, which give onto the corridor. He clears his throat and hesitates, then crosses the room and reaches through browning garlands to close the shutters on the street-facing windows as well. The house across the street—Baskaran’s uncle’s—also has a second storey.

Janaki had stood as he entered, and now holds the milk out to him. He takes it gravely and urges, “Sit.” He again hesitates—there is a chair in one corner of the room—and opts to sit on the other end of the bed. “Sit,” he repeats in a low voice. “Sit, ma.” She collapses a tiny bit at this endearment, and slowly perches again on the high mattress-topped bedstead. He pours the milk into the bowl, stopping before the almonds at the bottom slip out. He pours it back and forth, twice, to mix and cool it, then pours himself several sips, and drinks, watching her, before he pours a little more that he holds out to her. She accepts wordlessly and drinks. He pours her another and then shares the sweet, milk-cooked almonds out between them.