The Toss of a Lemon (76 page)

Vairum looks bemused and unabashedly triumphant. “It was, ahem...” he smiles. “It was my duty to my sister, as I saw it, and duty is an honour to uphold.”

“Yes.” Sita wags her head with martial vigour, even through tears. “It is.”

Janaki herself cannot help but contrast Baskaran’s ministrations with her father’s absence and her uncle’s passions. Baskaran stays at a guest house some ten minutes away for three days, coming to ceremonies, helping with logistics and children, offering graceful words of consolation. At the end of three days, he returns to Pandiyoor, where he is needed, but Janaki knows that he will return for the thirteenth-day ceremony.

She thinks, not for the first time, that if only he had a job and didn’t take snuff, he might be the perfect husband. When she speaks of him to Kamalam, though, as they lie side by side on their mats, taking this precious opportunity to exchange sisterly confidences, she emphasizes his faults, suspicious of the evil eye. Having seen two more households on the Pandiyoor Brahmin quarter reduced to penury through bad management of their family fortunes, she has started to wish, as her grandmother has from the start, that Baskaran were earning a regular income.

“But if he had a job,” Kamalam says, “like Saradha Akka’s and Sita Akka’s husbands, he wouldn’t be so flexible. It’s very good of him to come here and help. The old ways had their benefits.”

Janaki concedes. Baskaran is traditional in all the ways she likes: loyal to home and parents, upholding caste strictures out of deference to them, and in the interests of continuity She really shouldn’t complain.

Janaki journeys to Cholapatti shortly after the passing-on ceremony to spend some time with her grandmother. Sivakami protests that she will be fine, that Janaki shouldn’t be travelling more than necessary in her condition, but Janaki insists. Baskaran escorts her and stays three days on Gayatri’s hospitality, since protocol forbids a husband from staying in his wife’s home.

While Janaki feels proud of the simple graces of her grandmother’s home, she is also uncomfortably conscious of some differences between it and the home to which she has become accustomed. It feels a bit small and shabby; the servants are too visible and audible, too familiar and influential.

The shifting of her perceptions has been a gradual process. The first time she came home, she felt intensely nostalgic and wanted to pretend she never left. By her second visit, though, she could feel she was changing. She was shocked at Muchami calling her by her name, and he saw this, so now he doesn’t call her anything. They both realize, though they don’t speak of it, that she might have felt equally strange had he begun calling her Amma.

It was also on that visit that Mari had told her in low tones, after she had dressed, that she had forgotten her dirty clothes in a bucket in the bathroom. She rolled her eyes at her new habit, recalling how Vasantha and Swarna had laughed at her when they realized she had been washing her own clothes every day in Pandiyoor.

It irked and unsettled Janaki that she should struggle to find her place here. Even the act of getting up in the morning had become strange: at her grandmother’s house, when one rises, one clears one’s own mat, and at night, one lays it down again. In Pandiyoor, a servant clears and lays down the bedrolls. Janaki mentioned this difference to Radhai, within earshot of Mari and Muchami, pitching it in a falsely neutral tone, as though this judgment were mere observation.

Mari was rankled. “That is interesting,” she cut in, without breaking the rhythm of her work, patting fuel cakes from a pile of cow dung. She slapped the most recent onto the courtyard wall, where several rows were drying. “And do your in-laws’ servants take a bath afterward?”

Janaki blushed violently. She really had not been sure how she felt about this difference—on the one hand, she believes in upholding Brahmin practices and disapproves of any modern development that breaks down caste barriers. But the Pandiyoor customs don’t break down those practices—servants are non-Brahmins. Perhaps they aren’t polluted by sleep articles; perhaps they take a bath. How is that her business? She didn’t reply.

Through the old routines, though—setting a plate out back for the monkeys at dawn, snacking on a ball of thangai maavu in mid-afternoon, standing on the roof to watch the parrots at sunset—the small satisfactions of her childhood are returned to her, and she enjoys them, knowing she belongs somewhere else.

She is most concerned, on this visit, with making sure her grandmother is all right, following the shock of Visalam’s death. Sivakami looks lined, small and weary, the stiffness of her shoulder blades more pronounced than Janaki remembers. Suddenly awkward at being in the role of adult, Janaki tries to ask her grandmother how she is, and receives dismissive reassurances. She doesn’t know how to press through to the truth.

“Having you here is a great consolation to me,” Sivakami says. It’s after dusk and so Janaki lies with her head in her grandmother’s lap, Sivakami stroking her hair. “You must look after your health. Think peaceful thoughts. I’ll make garlic rasam for you—good for your strength, and the baby’s.”

Janaki wants to say something more, about Visalam and her untimely death, but doesn’t want to upset her grandmother, either by reminding her of their loss, or by crying, and so just quietly rests her cheek on the soft cloth over Sivakami’s bony thigh.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, Janaki is expected back in Cholapatti for her bangle ceremony. Muchami is excited about her arrival, especially since the occasion of her last visit was such an unhappy one. He misses the child she was, now no more than a ghost or vapour dancing around the woman she has become. Still, she reminds him of that long-ago child, and some of those lost, warm affections return to him in memory when he sees her.

Because Visalam’s death is still so recent, Sivakami has been anxious about the bangle ceremony: they must provide their relatives and neighbours a way to celebrate the new life while still observing grief, make Janaki feel happy and beautiful while not making her feel guilty. Kamalam, who had stayed behind in Kumbakonam to help Visalam’s in-laws with her children, arrives a few days before Janaki. Though Sivakami would never admit any such thing, Kamalam might be her favourite among the grandchildren: perfectly demure, unquestioning and capable. Sivakami feels reassured by the girl’s presence and puts her immediately to work, cooking for the feast day. Soon enough, Janaki arrives, escorted by Baskaran.

The day before the ceremony, though, some unwelcome but not unexpected information reaches Muchami via his regular channels. He had, a week or ten days earlier, put a word out requesting this information, after having seen something that didn’t quite look right.

He doesn’t go out every night as he did when he was younger but does still make his way through the woods and fields twice or three times a week, in search of other men, like him, who need physical satisfactions they cannot give or receive in their marriages. It happens that he sees things on these journeys. Some things he understands immediately; some he must work to interpret.

As has been said, the only people abroad at night are those (like Muchami, it could be argued) who have no choice. One of those who must be out is the barber who clips the heads of Brahmin widows, a work of shame and sorrow done in the dark hour favoured by demons. Sivakami has her head shaved monthly, usually by the same barber who sheared her curls in the days of her widow-making and left her light-headed under the moonlight. Now, occasionally, it is his second son who comes. The first son used to come, until his family decided he, meaning all of them, would be better off if he used his skill with a blade to get latex out of trees in Malayan plantations.

So it happened, one night, that Muchami was returning home and saw the barber’s second son entering the rear courtyard of a Brahmin-quarter widow who lives three houses over from Minister and Gayatri. He didn’t think it strange until, some ten days later, he saw the same thing again. It was then that he mentioned it to some cohorts who have now confirmed for him that the barber’s second son, Karuppan, has been coming and going from the house of the widow, Shantam, four or five nights each week. No one’s hair grows that fast.

Muchami is outraged. He stalks home as though burning the fields in his wake, like Hanuman setting Lanka alight with his tail. He knows he must decide what best to do with this information and that it might be his obligation to go to Vairum, who, as his employer and the master of a house on the Brahmin quarter, is most entitled to know and take action. He is in Cholapatti this week. But Muchami is not convinced that Vairum will do what must be done: he has never shown caste loyalty; if anything, he acts as though it would please him to see the entire Brahmin quarter in ruin. And if he tells Vairum and Vairum does nothing, it will be much more difficult then to redress this ill.

He decides to call a conference. He invites Minister and Murthy to come to Sivakami’ s house after tiffin. He tells Vairum not to go to play tennis. He tells Sivakami only that the others will be coming, not why. He is trembling at the impropriety of it. This is the sort of thing about which he could gossip to Sivakami were it to have happened several villages away. But so close to home, to the home whose honour it is his dearest duty to uphold?

That morning, the bangle ceremony is held for Janaki. Every woman on the Brahmin quarter pushes a pair of glass bangles onto Janaki’s wrists, until her arms are covered nearly to the elbows. Sivakami watches from behind the kitchen door, smiling at Janaki’s face, at the auspicious tinkling of the bangles, worn until the birth. Some women pull the bangles off in labour, as a way to distract themselves from the pain or count down the time until it is over. She catches sight of her own bare wrist on the door, the skin loose and wrinkled, and tucks her arm under her pallu.

That afternoon, Murthy and Minister arrive for the conference within minutes of each other. Vairum lounges suspiciously in the hall. Muchami has been pacing from courtyard to garden, and now sees them. Sivakami takes a position behind the nearly closed double doors in the pantry between the hall and kitchen. Muchami has told the children they must stay in the courtyard or go out to play, that he will beat them if he catches them listening. It seems to have worked, though he doesn’t see Janaki, out of sight in the room under the stairs: she doesn’t consider herself a child, doesn’t fear a beating from Muchami, and is curious.

Now Muchami, standing in the door to the garden, tells them what he knows.

Murthy begins immediately to splutter and shake. Minister looks circumspect and deeply troubled.

How it came about they wonder but have no idea. Maybe Karuppan forced her, the first time, and has been blackmailing her. Or Shantam, the widow, may have permitted it all along. She is a sullen and feisty type. She and her husband had loud, frequent fights in the years of their marriage, and she has had loud, frequent fights with her in-laws since he died. One of Gayatri’s regular jokes is about the fact that this woman’s name means “peace”—what would she have been like if her name had meant “hot-tempered”?

Vairum looks exasperated.

“What concern is this of mine?” he asks Muchami, and then looks at the others to see if they can answer. “Let her bring shame on her own head and her house.”

“No, son.” Minister cradles his forehead in his forefinger and thumb. It looks as if someone gave him a gun and he can’t decide how to use it. “He is the criminal in this situation. A woman’s virtue is that of her family, and he has destroyed it, whether or not she chooses each night to open her door.”

“I-I-I can’t even—how—understand, how you c-c-can both still be sitting and t-talking!” Murthy has leapt from his chair. “Open her door! I-I-I’ll open his head, that’s what!” He is running for the door now, his hands over his ears. “Ugh! Ogh! My ears are poisoned by what I have heard today!” He stumbles in an attempt to mount the two or three steps to his own veranda, and succumbs to an attack of asthma, whereupon a few passersby stop to ask what is wrong. He tells them.

Janaki wants desperately to go to her grandmother and console her. Sivakami is so restrained in her behaviour and outlook that Janaki imagines news of such an atrocity would shake her to the core. Really, though, she wants reassurance as much as she wants to give it.

That night, Shantam’s nearest neighbours’ servants are posted in the brush beyond her courtyard gate. The unlucky lover arrives. He pushes open the door, enters, closes it behind him. Each of the servants slips from his hiding place. Each goes to the door of the house he serves and tells his employer that the barber is inside. Each goes to the next house and tells the master of that house. Moments pass and from each house emerges its master. Each master carries a big stick.

What is the barber’s second son thinking? He must be about seventeen, she about twice his age, plump and fair, while he is dark as rosewood. Sivakami thinks of them as she does her beading, working fast, very fast. She hears one of the servants knock on their door to inform Vairum that the moment has come for action. Muchami, who is spending the night in the courtyard, tells him Vairum will not come because Vairum said he will have nothing to do with this nonsense, that mobs always chase phantoms, that he has to work in the morning, unlike these professional moralists in search of a night’s entertainment. Minister also will not participate, because of possible political repercussions. There are more than enough hands, anyway—more than fifteen pairs, all holding sticks, heading for the house, the third rough-hewn gate east of Gayatri’s.

Did he force her? Sivakami wonders. But why didn’t she just bar the door and not permit him to come again? Could he really have blackmailed her? She would have been defiled and disgraced, but better that than going through it night after night, no? Unless she really did choose this...