The Toss of a Lemon (77 page)

Sivakami can barely bring herself to think it. A barber, one of the worst classes of untouchables. A Brahmin woman choosing to be with a barber. Sivakami casts her mind back to the years of her marriage and remembers, vividly still because barely a night has passed in forty years when she hasn’t thought about the acts of love she and her husband performed with each other. She can’t help it: her mind begins to imagine Shantam and the barber’s son in these poses, and she shudders, disgusted, but her mind keeps picturing it. She tries to keep the bile down and her mind clear by concentrating on the image she is working in beads, Lord Krishna at Bhutana’s poisoned breast. It doesn’t work. She runs outside and vomits.

Janaki, lying in the main hall with her siblings, hears her grandmother go out back and rises to meet her in the kitchen.

“Do you want a cup of water, Amma?” she asks.

“I’m fine, child.” Sivakami dippers herself a cup and drinks. “Go back to sleep.”

Dimly, they hear the sound of shouting, getting closer.

“I heard, Amma,” Janaki confesses. “I know.”

Sivakami sighs, and shakes her head, then draws Janaki down to sit beside her. “Pray with me. You mustn’t think about such terrible matters, not in your condition. Good girl.” She takes out her beads and begins the mantra she repeats one thousand and one times daily. Janaki joins in chorus.

Karuppan has closed the door but not drawn the heavy bolt. He never does, why should he? Shantam is waiting for him on the wooden bench on the back of the house where she is made to sleep. She hates sleeping there, but each of the bedrooms is now taken up with one of her late husband’s brothers. Each of them is married now, and so they need private rooms. She could sleep in a corner of the main hall with the children, but it’s her mother-in-law’s prerogative and she wants Shantam to sleep outside. Shantam makes up for it in small cruelties toward her nephews and nieces, and even, sometimes, toward her own children.

She is sitting, waiting for him on her bench. He crosses to her on silent feet. Her sari has already slipped from her head and now he unwinds it from her shoulders and buries his face in the soft flesh between her collarbone and breast, stroking his lips and eyelids across the pillow of silky, fragrant skin. She is so unlike the women of his class—not that he has had one yet, but he can tell. They stand and walk past the cowshed into the garden, her sari beginning already to unwrap. They pull it after themselves and spread it on the garden floor. And when the enraged men burst into the courtyard and run from there into the garden, this is what they see: the widow trying to wrap herself back into the white sari that has been serving as her illicit conjugal bed, and the glistening form of the barber’s second son, reaching the top of the garden wall and jumping down off it.

By now, Shantam’s mother-in-law and other family members, who had not been informed about the raid, have flung open numerous internal doors. Some of the men run through the house to the front and start shouting for those doors to be unlocked, while others have already run back out and through the neighbours’ houses onto the Brahmin-quarter street, to see which way the scoundrel is going. Every woman on the street, except Sivakami and Janaki, is witness to the flight of the naked and terrified boy, who streaks straight up the Brahmin quarter, whistled along by the wind of the matrons’ gasps.

The men give chase. They chase him far, through bramble and brooks. He is much faster than they, but two send their servants on bicycles to cut him off. He is caught. These weak, pulpy Brahmins, worked up by the chase, beat Karuppan very badly. Muchami helps in the chase but participates only a little in the beating.

Shantam is also chastised and lightly beaten by her mother-in-law, in front of her children and all her brothers- and sisters-in-law.

These are the events of that night. After the shouting mob passes and the sound fades away, Sivakami tells Janaki to go back to sleep.

Sivakami resumes her beading. She hears the men return and go to their homes. Muchami comes back, too, and tells her what happened. Then he lies down in the courtyard to sleep. She closes the kitchen doors, goes into the pantry and closes those doors, too. She lies where she normally lies. She is calmer but can feel the horrible images trying to re-form in her mind’s eye. She tries to banish them again, and images of her husband—his skin sliding against hers, the smoothness of his back where she gripped it, her fingertips notching his spine—slip in with distressing ease to replace those of the barber’s son, who is just a few years younger than Hanumarathnam was when he died. Sivakami doesn’t permit herself to move—she lies, as every night, on her side, on the cool floor of the pantry, her neck on a wooden rest—but shifts her legs minutely against that delicious discomfort that now can never be eased. She had almost managed to forget that gnaw and tickle, brushed it away with busyness and prayer. The advance of age was a relief: in the last ten years, the craving has begun to diminish. Now her chest feels thick with anger at Shantam for having reminded her.

Shantam has been a widow for less than ten years, less than ten years feeling no touch save that of her children, and even that only after sunset—and Shantam’s not even permitted to sleep with them. Sivakami recalls her first years of widowhood, when she slept curled around Vairum, the warm pressure of his milk-smelling, dream-twitching, little-boy body anchoring her to her own body, which seemed, in daylight, not to exist at all.

Sivakami wraps her arms around herself, biting her lip. She knows what Shantam has endured. But it is their lot to endure. If not, why else does Sivakami live as she does? What appeal is there in a topsy-turvy world and what place does a widow have, if not this one?

Janaki, sleepless among the children, desperately misses Baskaran. She could talk with him about this, as she can with no one else, and he would hold her and help her think of other things. What if she never sees him again? What if he dies before she returns? She would never again be touched. It would be like her childhood all over again.

She had never before thought beyond her grandmother’s sacrifice and righteousness. She believed in everything Sivakami believed but never thought of her grandmother as sharing her feelings.
I’m exactly the age Amma was when she was widowed, she realizes. How did she bear it?

Janaki wants to share the village’s anger at Shantam’s breach, but, in the grip now of this strange pity for the girl her grandmother was, she is unable. She, in Sivakami’s position, might well have gone mad.

At first light the next morning, a bullock solemnly pulls a cart down the Brahmin quarter from Shantam’s house toward Kulithalai (most bullocks look solemn, this one especially so). On the cart are two men and a big load of hay from which they are creating a wake, systematically depositing large handfuls behind them on the path and roadway. When this is done, a priest from the Brahmin-quarter temple drops three lumps of burning camphor at the edge of the straw carpet, which begins where Karuppan landed after vaulting Shantam’s wall. Three palms of flame grow fingers, join hands and run up the Brahmin quarter. Where the fire hits a pocket of damp, it pops and hisses much like the good Brahmin folk of the village waiting for the street to be purified so that they can meet and rehash the night’s events. When the veil of smoke lifts, the carpet of straw has magically changed into one of ash, with little straw bits here and there, and the Brahmin quarter, too, has been magically restored to its former untouchability, which the untouchable robbed by his touch.

That morning, at Sivakami’s, Gayatri expresses perfunctory regret about the beatings but is philosophical.

“It’s terrible, it really is, but what could they have expected?”

Minister has contacted a French mission doctor of his acquaintance, who would go and see the boy today.

Gayatri notices Mari scrubbing pots with extraordinary vigour and asks what she thinks.

“Such liaisons must be stopped!” Mari retorts in a tone of voice that implies she is more offended at Gayatri having felt the need to ask than at the subject of the question.

“Clearly, yes, clearly,” Gayatri mutters, taking offence at Mari’s tone.

Young Kesavan enters shaking his head and clucking his tongue.

“Why, why, why, why, why...” He shakes his head.

People so often think something becomes more profound if repeated. Sometimes it does.

“Why don’t Brahmins permit widow remarriage?” he asks.

This is not what Sivakami and Janaki expected to hear.

“I think it is terribly wrong, what they did,” he continues, because this is how he feels and because he would hate to lose this job due to some misapprehension of his position on Sivakami’s part. “But if widows were permitted to remarry and if we could rid ourselves of this terrible caste prejudice, maybe this would not have been necessary for them.”

“This was not necessary for them,” Sivakami starts, and Kesavan replies, “Oh, yes.”

“And remarriage?” she continues. “What is this ‘remarriage’? Marriage is something that can only happen once.”

“But men are permitted another wife,” Kesavan says, after a slight, ingratiating, pause.

“If the first wife does not complete him. If there is no child,” Sivakami splutters. “But then it was not really a marriage, so the second is really the first. Or if there are children who need a mother.”

Janaki watches her grandmother. She has never seen her angry like this.
Her convictions are what sustained her,
Janaki thinks
. How dare Vairum Mama try to challenge her on her beliefs? They are the reason she is alive.

No one ever knows Shantam’s opinion on the subject, because she disappears the next day, taking with her jewels—those that should have been her daughter‘s—and six silk saris belonging to her sisters-in-law. She is never seen in Cholapatti again. From time to time a rumour floats back: Shantam seen in Thanjavur, thinner and darker, living with a pearl fisherman and selling pearls on the harbour road. Shantam, cheeks and ears pierced with tridents, hair grown matted and coiled atop her half-mad head, running up to pilgrims in the Palani temple and telling their fortunes whether they want them or not. Shantam, fatter and fairer, living in Benares, masquerading as a wealthy Parsee widow running a charity home for destitute or abandoned Brahmin widows. None of the rumours is ever corroborated.

Karuppan, the barber’s second son, needs surgery and is taken to the French mission hospital to have it done, but by then he has been bleeding internally for ten or twelve hours, so it’s too late and he dies. At the beginning of the following year, the company employing Karuppan’s older brother fails. It’s a bad time for rubber, and for companies generally. He is sent home on a ship that gets caught in a typhoon and founders on some rocks. If there are survivors, he is not among them. His parents have now lost both of their sons. They never have grandchildren. Their older son’s widow, as is not uncommon in their community, remarries.

The elder barber goes back to shaving the heads of all his customers. Perhaps he still says “I’m sorry,” as he did to Sivakami, before shaving a Brahmin widow’s head for the first time.

Perhaps not.

JANAKI HAD THOUGHT SHE MIGHT STAY at her grandmother’s house until the birth, but Baskaran comes to escort her home the week before the annual festival for the goddess Meenakshi of Madurai. Senior Mami has had a dream, in which the goddess appeared as a bride and reproached her for not coming to her wedding. Senior Mami tried to protest: it’s so far away, the family contributes much to the festival through the charitable trust, her daughters-in-law are attending, but she could not utter any of this. It was as though she had been gagged by a wooden ball. The goddess, already at the end of her patience, yelled at her to defend herself but still Senior Mami could not speak. Just as the goddess turned away—to receive, as it happens, the supplications of their immediate next-door neighbours on Double Street—Senior Mami regained her voice. It was too late—Meenakshi was bestowing all her favours on the neighbours.

The next morning, Senior Mami decreed that every member of their family must make an extra effort this year. Senior Mami herself will visit the temple to donate a ruby pendant for the goddess, along with the sari and cash the family gives every year. She will even participate in serving water and buttermilk on the street in front of the chattram. She hasn’t come in person for years.

Sivakami disapproves of Janaki travelling all the way back to Pandiyoor in advanced pregnancy, then courting illness by serving buttermilk in the hot sun, not to mention courting the evil eye by displaying herself, pregnant, to so many. Baskaran appreciates her concerns but cannot find it within him to contradict his mother. He promises Sivakami that Janaki will do no real work and return within a month.

Every family member participates in the serving, however ceremonially. Even Dhoraisamy comes—once—to dip the ladle, fill a cup for some passing wayfarer and offer it with wishes for his refreshment and renewed devotional strength. Senior Mami does nearly a dozen before collapsing in a sweat into the shade of the chattram. Each of the sons serves for several hours, with his wife and children. Baskaran and Janaki serve on the sixth day. They, too, drink the water and the buttermilk—yogourt churned with water, lemon, salt and asafetida—the best antidotes to the year’s hottest season. Janaki serves a few people and then keeps Baskaran company, sitting in the shade on the chattram veranda and fanning herself.

Mid-morning of that day, a covered palanquin passes, carried by two men. The palanquin continues a few yards beyond the chattram, then pauses. With effort, the men reverse their strides and set the litter down in front of the buttermilk-filled cauldron and the brass water drum. A hennaed hand parts the curtains veiling the palanquin, and a pale, hennaed foot slips out from between them.