The Toss of a Lemon (80 page)

She locks the front door behind her, inserts the key carefully into her travel bundle, and turns, feeling self-conscious, to the car, which has attracted a crowd. Vairum takes the bag of snacks with a small, sardonic grin as the uniformed driver holds the door open. Sivakami mounts the running board and enters the cavern of the car’s back seat. It is a rare sunny day in November, the height of the rainy season, and the air inside the car has congealed into a warm stillness. Vairum is lending his ear to a man in the crowd who seems to have a proposal. The neighbours and children press in a bit closer, their interest renewed by seeing Sivakami within the car. Gayatri and Minister are here, too, waving cheerily, but Sivakami, feeling uncomfortably like a bride in this red chariot, can’t smile back. She’s a little irritated at being made the subject of a spectacle. It is inappropriate, but she couldn’t expect Vairum to sympathize with that. Finally, Vairum enters the car. He settles himself on the grey upholstered seat while the driver closes the door and runs around the front to start the car.

It takes them some twelve hours to reach Madras, during which time Sivakami takes no food or water—no food because she eats nothing she hasn’t cooked herself, nor water because she will only drink that reserved for Brahmins. Vairum and his driver eat at a grand restaurant in Pondicherry, where Vairum has a meeting. She waits for them in the car, watching the gawkers cluster, again, into a crowd. The gleaming, showy vehicle would have drawn an audience anyhow, but the sight of an orthodox Brahmin widow tucked inside inspires comments. Sivakami unwinds her prayer beads from her wrist and says mantras until Vairum returns.

He is silent for most of the journey. For a brief time, following the meeting, he looks over some papers, and he takes a short nap. Otherwise, he stares out his window and she out hers. She imagines the quiet between them is companionable, that they are both lost in the same rosy visions of the months and years to come—but he doesn’t say and she doesn’t really know what he is thinking.

It is after eight o’clock when they reach Madras. The city welters up around them, almost before Sivakami realizes it has. The houses on Vairum’s street look, to Sivakami, grand enough to be government offices. In the car port, the driver opens her door, and she follows Vairum’s striding form up the stairs, yearning to be invisible as she feels his employees’ discreetly curious eyes. Upstairs, she creeps along the narrow balcony, keeping her gaze on the floor. In the outdoor reception area, Vani falls at her feet and ushers her through the majestic carved wooden doors into the sitting room. The black and white tiles are cool, like taut silk. Sivakami’s callused feet make slapping sounds that ring in the airy room’s besieged hush—the quiet of a house sheltered from traffic noise by tall trees and a serious class differential. The sound of her feet against the brick of the Cholapatti floor was immediately dulled by the roughness of the floor, and the sounds of the village, always entering without leave.

She is so happy to see Vani, especially with the glow of expectancy lighting her rounded features. She appears cheerful and girlish as she shows Sivakami around, a terrific contrast with her appearance in recent years. She is about six months along and is significantly heavier, an effect enhanced by her nine-yard sari. But one would not guess Vani was pregnant from her figure, Sivakami thinks with some satisfaction: all the better to protect her from the evil eye.

Vani leads her to her room. She is not sure she likes this: a room of her own. It has one set of narrow double doors leading onto the rear courtyard, and another leading onto the sitting room. It seems inappropriate to her, excessive, for a lonely widow to take up an entire room, but she puts her Ramayana and extra sari in a wall-niche cupboard, along with her beading, and follows Vani out into the courtyard, in the centre of which is a well and a depression for washing dishes. This feels relatively familiar. The toilet and bath stalls are in the far corner. No more four-in-the-morning-blue-air dips in the Kaveri, she realizes. Will she really feel clean without sand encrusting her feet? From the courtyard, Vani shows her into the kitchen, where Vairum has deposited the satchel of snacks. It has a second set of doors onto a dining room, and a third, onto a rear puja room.

Sivakami takes water—the first she has drunk all day—pouring it from the brass jug down her throat without touching the jar to her lips, and then bathes and performs oblations for the gods in Vairum’s puja room. Taking up a fistful of salt, she beckons Vani, making sure Vairum doesn’t see, and circles her three times each way with the fist, saying the familiar curses under her breath. “May your eyes burst open if anything happens to this child.” She looks around, unsure of where to throw evil-eye-soaked salt in a house without a canal out back. Vani points to the bathroom.

She turns next to familiarizing herself with the kitchen so she can cook herself a meal. So this is what it feels like to be so near the sea she has never seen, she thinks: the air itself clings like damp cloth. She finds herself waving her hand in front of her face as though she has walked through a cobweb; she finds the cupboard contents limp and sticky. She greets the servant couple from Cholapatti. The man has been given other chores, since Sivakami will do most of the cooking while she is here, but the woman remains to help with washing, peeling and chopping, and Sivakami shyly asks her how to use the stove.

Vairum has never told Sivakami anything about his work. Sometimes she has asked Muchami questions, and he has explained what he understood, based on gossip and on his observations as he accompanied Vairum in the field. She understands Vairum has a reputation for fairness and has earned a great deal of respect from both their tenants and his factory workers in the Kulithalai Taluk. She knows he had dealings with non-Brahmins but doesn’t believe he will bring them into his house. Janaki and Kamalam had sworn to her, on returning from their Madras visit, that they ate no cooked food in non-Brahmin houses. It didn’t occur to Sivakami to ask whether non-Brahmins ate food in Vairum’s house. What is the purpose of soiling himself thus? He eats in restaurants—can’t he just meet them there?

The first time it happens, she is convulsed with disgust:
she
has cooked this food and Vairum and Vani are sitting
together
with three of those people, in plain view of those people, polluted by their gaze. She never shows herself in front of guests, Brahmin or non-Brahmin; the cook serves. But she glimpsed them as they entered—dark-skinned, evidently wealthy—and could hear them, using inflections and terms foreign to Brahmins, and imagined them eating the food she had prepared. She crouches in the door between the kitchen and puja room, feeling ill. The crowning insult is when they cut through the kitchen to the courtyard to wash their hands—they enter the kitchen! On their way back to the sitting room, they stop to compliment her lavishly on the food, mortifying her with their lack of manners.

That night, she performs purification ceremonies, waving camphor and muttering prayers, to make the kitchen usable again. The next day, unable to help herself, she tries to talk to Vairum about the breach.

“Kanna, I have heard that non-Brahmins are very fond of our food,” she opens, timidly. “But shouldn’t you consider Vani’s feelings?”

Vairum snorts, looking amused. “What are you saying, Amma?”

“Vani is a good wife—she can’t tell you this herself, and would never disobey you,” she presses gently. “But you shouldn’t make her eat with those... with non-Brahmins, kanna.”

“Vani no more believes in such artificial distinctions than I do, Amma,” he says sharply. “We keep Brahmin cooks only because they prepare food in the style we are accustomed to and like—not because we subscribe to your outmoded provincial prejudices. Got that?”

Sivakami is defenceless. Hanumarathnam never spoke rudely like this to anyone. Vairum is more polite to his peons than to his mother. How has she lost her son to a world turned upside-down? Was it for this that she educated him? Perhaps she should have kept him in the paadasaalai, she resorts to thinking, briefly indignant. At least he would have valued his Brahminhood then, even if his caste status were the only thing he had to be proud of.

In December, Sita arrives for her delivery, bringing her elder daughter and twin sons. Kamalam and Janaki also come, Kamalam to help Sita, and Janaki for company. Everyone but the expectant mother is accommodated in the guest quarters below. Sivakami’s room becomes a birthing chamber and Sivakami relocates to the kitchen floor, where she feels significantly more at ease than she did taking up a room all on her own. Vani’s nieces hold a bangle ceremony for her, and now the merry tinkle of glass mingles with her music when she plays, along with the sisters’ chatter and the clamour of their children.

“It’s like being back in the village!” Sivakami overhears Vairum telling Sita’s husband, at the eleventh-day ceremony. “In the best sense, of course. Nothing like the sound of children’s voices to gladden the heart, no?”

Sivakami sees Janaki’s expression: all of the Cholapatti clan present for the ceremony are painfully aware that he has not always felt like this about the sound of children.

Visalam’s in-laws come for the ceremony also, with a proposal for Vairum: the year of mourning for Visalam has ended and Kamalam is now eligible for marriage. She is already part of the household, they say; there’s no sense in breaking the family bond. The children need a mother and she has proven already that she can be that to them.

Kamalam acts surprised and embarrassed, but it is clear to all of them how comfortable she has felt at her future in-laws’ house. Vairum happily accepts.

That afternoon, Vani plays a short concert for the guests. Sivakami disapproves and again makes the mistake, as Vani settles herself, of telling Vairum, “I am surprised you are not concerned about exposing her to the evil eye. She is almost eight months pregnant!”

“Oh, is she?” Vairum arches an eyebrow with consummate sarcasm. “I never would have known! Thank you for telling me, Amma! Oh, my, my wife is nearly eight months pregnant!”

Sivakami withdraws, humiliated, to the kitchen, where Janaki is stirring tapioca pudding on the stove for Sita’s children.

“Is she well?” Janaki asks, a faint prying note in her voice. “One would hardly believe Vani Mami is pregnant.”

It’s true: Vani is nearing her due date and no larger than she was when Sivakami arrived in Madras.

“She is ready to be a mother!” Sivakami answers, sounding stiff. “Sometimes, when Sita’s baby girl cries, Vani’s breasts begin dripping so, so! The front of her sari gets soaked!”

“Oh, listen!” Janaki says. “She’s playing ‘Jaggadhodharana’! It brings me straight back to Cholapatti, Amma, that sound. Next summer, we’ll all gather there, all the cousins, and Vani Mami will bring her child, and we can all look after it while she plays.”

Sita’s children swarm into the kitchen, whining for tapioca, and Janaki leads them out into the dining room.

DECEMBER BLEEDS INTO JANUARY, January creeps away and February swells into fullness, but Vani does not go into labour. She exhibits all the torpor and discomfort of advanced pregnancy, as though her burden is too great to bear and too precious to pass on, but she looks no bigger.

Sivakami is a patient woman, but she’s not accustomed to waiting so long for this particular gratification. Gayatri, who had planned to come for the baby’s naming ceremony, finally comes anyway, nearly two months after Vani’s supposed due date.

“What on earth is going on?” she whispers loudly, as Sivakami serves her coffee in the kitchen. Vani is playing her veena in the sitting room, providing them with a cover of sound. “She’s not pregnant, is she?”

“Of course she is.” Sivakami combines the decoction with milk and sugar, pouring it from tumbler to bowl to mix it. “They must have miscalculated, miscounted.”

“How long has it been since she last had her period?”

“I can’t ask that,” Sivakami responds reasonably, setting the coffee down in front of Gayatri and fetching biscuits.

“Have they seen a doctor?”

“I should hope not,” Sivakami ejects, tartly indignant.

After a pause, Gayatri says, “I’m going to ask.”

When Vani, after playing, comes into the kitchen for a drink of water, Gayatri beckons her.

“Come, dear.” She pats the place beside her, and Vani plumps herself down awkwardly. “You look exhausted. I know all too well what it is like to be in this stage—every day seems like an eternity. Tell me, though: when did you last have your period?”

Vani frowns and looks away.

“Come now. You don’t want this to go too long. It’s not healthy for the baby, nor for you. You know there are remedies to help the baby along. Shall I find out about some for you?”

“No doctors,” Vani says loudly, and Gayatri startles.

“Has Vairum taken you to any doctors?” Gayatri inquires.