The Toss of a Lemon (82 page)

She takes out her neem stick and sets her bundle down. The water gushes out brightly and she moves the bundle out of its reach. She fills her brass jug and squats to scrub her face over the drain. She hears a voice calling “Granny, Granny!”-no doubt some young person meeting her grandmother after a long time, and she thinks of the grandchildren she might see soon. She wets her neem stick and puts it in her mouth as the train starts to pull away. She looks up at the train, then down. Where is her bundle?

The young woman who shared her carriage has come to the window and is waving and pointing, “Granny! Granny!” But then she is carried past into another void.

Did she see who took it?

Sivakami runs a little in each direction like a caricature of a woman in distress, then realizes she may as well finish cleaning her teeth, and stands chewing the stick like an imbecile. Her bundle is gone—her money, her ticket, her Kamba-Ramayanam. The only person left on the platform is a peon sleeping against the ticket booth at the far end. She savours the neem’s bitterness as she scrubs its frayed end over her teeth and tongue.

The platform sits on a plot of scrubby dirt and there are colonies of some kind in the near distance. This doesn’t look like a big station with frequent ongoing trains. She trudges toward the ticket booth, but it’s still closed and she doesn’t know what she would do if it were open. The dozing peon, in a rumpled uniform of khaki shorts and shirt with fewer buttons than advisable, rolls onto his back. From the west, a woman in a khaki sari arrives and starts sweeping the station—likely her husband died in service, and she was given his job because the railways take care of their own. Sivakami doesn’t try to talk to anyone. She tries to think.

Saradha lives here somewhere. Somewhere in Thiruchi, on a street by the name of Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter, in house number “6,” as she recalls. She probably lives closer to the main station than to this place called Kottai, which is not what she thought it was. So if Sivakami follows the train she just disembarked, she will eventually arrive. She hopes she encounters a Brahmin quarter somewhere before long. She is parched.

Sivakami walks to the end of the platform, climbs off it to reach the track, where she puts her right foot upon a tie, and then her left foot on the next one. That’s the first step.

Or was Vairum’s last word the first step? Or was the first step when she took Vairum back to Cholapatti to raise him on her own? Or was it Hanumarathnam’s, fleeing to read his fate’s fulfillment in the sky? Now she tries not to think.

The sun rises, hot and hard. She passes through the centre of a labourers’ encampment, the unwashed wives tying sun-bleached hair back with other strands of hair, leaning over the day’s fire, the day’s gruel. The children point at Sivakami and run toward her, bellies out. Their mothers approach, shyly and swiftly, until Sivakami is forced to stop because a cordon has formed around her.

“Amma, Amma, where are you going, Amma?”

“I’m going to find my granddaughter.”

How dare they speak to her?

“Amma, Amma, why hasn’t she come to fetch you, Amma?”

“She doesn’t know I’m here.”

Why are they not making way?

“Amma, Amma, please sit, Amma. Please sit.”

“Please, please let me go on.”

So many people she was never meant to meet.

“Amma, Amma, be careful, Amma.”

“I will. I will. Please, let me go on.”

They part to permit her egress, grinning at her distress, or so she feels.

God willing, her Cholapatti neighbours will never know she has gone through this. How many of their lives contain miseries hidden from her? She remembers wondering this when Rukmini, poor dear, and Gayatri were going through their troubles. But her compassion for them doesn’t reduce her own desire for privacy: we are ill equipped to bear even our own sadnesses, she knows, and many burdens are only made heavier by sharing.

She sees a big hill and wonders if it is Malaikottai, the Ganesha temple she has dreamed of visiting. Maybe Saradha will take her there. She wonders how far she is from Saradha’s house.

She squints against the rails’ glare, the sun a feverish palm on her crown. A burst of laughter causes her to turn her head. She almost missed it: a pilgrims’ pavilion, a stone gazebo, in a triangle formed by the rail line and two roads.

Sivakami approaches. She must get out of the sun for a moment. She would rather the place have been empty, but...

The bunch sitting on the cool stone rip into peals of merriment again and their babble, as Sivakami approaches, resolves into speech. She stops. They are Brahmins. They will wonder if she is known to them. She may be, by marriage or some other connection. They call out to her. “Mami, please, Mami, sit. But... are you alone?”

“Yes, yes, alone,” she says, wishing she had just gone on.

“Please, sit.” They rise to make room for her.

“Sit, sit,” she insists, now that they are all standing. “Sit, I say.”

She clears her throat and looks away. Her mind is working more quickly even than she can think. She has the first word, she should use it to her advantage. “Where have you all come from?”

“Namakkal, Mami. Do you know it?”

She grew up in its shadow.

“I went there once, as a small child, with my grandparents. I don’t remember it. Wonderful, is it?”

“Oh, yes, a very fine place. And you, Mami, where do you come from”

“Cuddalore.”

That just popped out.

“Oh, our niece married into Cuddalore.”

“Ah, so you have been there?” she asks, terrified they will make reference to some landmark or family she doesn’t know.

“No, not us. This is as far as we have ventured. We are making a pilgrim tour, going to Palani, Srirangam, all the important places.”

“Very good, very good.” Sivakami is so relieved that she can no longer listen.

“And you, Mami?” they ask, their curiosity bursting to the surface. “How do you come to be so far from home, and alone?”

“A ... penance,” she responds. Penance? “For... the sake of my son... who was ill.”

“Oh, no, Mami.” They are all sympathy. Their curiosity, though, is unrelieved.

“Yes, yes. He is well now, recovering, in Cuddalore, with his wife and family.” Sivakami listens to the sound of her voice. Has she ever been lied to as easily as she is now lying? “I pledged a pilgrimage,” she continues slickly.

“But if he was sick, shouldn’t he do the pilgrimage?” One of the wives asks, unable to contain herself.

“I pledged, I pledged to do it. Alone. Myself, alone. Maybe he will also do it someday. He is a good and pious boy, very attached to me. He protested.”

Sivakami, relieved both of the heat and the pressure of possible acquaintanceship, speaks with increasing conviction.

“But I told him, God accepted a small price for your health, for a useless old widow to undertake a journey alone. He shouldn’t be so attached. I have no husband; my children are grown. I wish for God to take me. My work on this earth is over.”

It’s what old people say, but this is the first time she has said it, and now it occurs to her that she might mean it.

“Will you take some of our food, Mami?” asks another of the wives.

“No, no, please, thank you.” They understand, and don’t press.

“But... water?” asks the first man who spoke.

“Yes.” She holds out her jug and they pour water into it from one of their vessels.

“Where will you stay in Thiruchi?”

“With...” Oh, no, what if Saradha’s related to them? “My granddaughter.” She didn’t think quickly enough—she should have said a chattram. But they might be staying in a chattram and might have insisted on taking her.

“Her husband’s good name?” asks the first man again.

It’s easier to tell the truth now than lie. “Sivasamba lyer.”

“Ah.” No recognition.

“And your good names?” she asks politely.

“Ranganathan lyengar.”

Oh, they are lyengar—a different sub-caste from hers. She ceases listening again, relief pounding in her ears. No relation. She nods with real happiness as Ranganathan Iyengar introduces his brother, their wives, their children. They are slightly, almost imperceptibly, chillier toward her, which is as she prefers.

They have just finished their meal and lie down to rest through the heat of the day. Sivakami lies down too, but when the food in their bellies goes to their heads, she slips down off the cool platform back into the sun. She can’t risk their accompanying her, which they surely would do. She is sure to be caught in a lie if she is forced to talk any longer and would rather her face be burnt by the sun than by embarrassment. It’s terrible that she prefers her lies to the truth, but, she has learned, that’s what some lies are like.

Three furlongs down the tracks from where she left the cheery pilgrims, she finds a crumbling roadside shrine hung with crisply browned jasmine garlands. The god within is everyone’s favourite, chubby Ganesha. Sivakami smiles sadly at his friendly elephant face, grasps her left ear in her right hand and her right ear with the other and squats a few times, the traditional abasement for him. As she rises from her last squat, she falls forward onto her knees and grasps the shrine, sobbing.

Her tears turn instantly to dry pits in the dusty ground. She squints up at her old friend, and quietly shrieks, “Take me. Take me!”

The god responds good-humouredly, “I cannot take you. But I cannot stop you either. Come along if you want.”

“Take me, I say! Please, Lord.”

“Come, foolish lady,” he smiles, but not as though he has time to waste, “if you want to so badly.”

Sivakami circles the shrine thrice, in a temper. Has she not been a firm and doubtless devotee? Has she not lived by every prescription she knows?

The gods do love their jokes: human prayer is always earnest and divine replies so often ironic. Sivakami throws up her hands and returns to walking along the track, stepping from one tie to the next. She doesn’t look back nor about. She maintains a dim awareness of her feet, one in front of the other, in front of the other, on the wooden ties which fall one in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front—just like the train—in front of the other in front of the other... in fact there’s a train on the track. There’s a train on the track train on the track train on the track... She can’t see it yet, but the vibrations are growing. She hasn’t looked around in some time. Now she finds she is deep within a ditch, the track laid in a furrow with embankments on both sides taller than she is.

Here is her reward, the answer to her prayers. She need only accept.

The head of the train appears. Accept.

Its face nears. It screams and the noise hits her, a foretaste of steel. The rails sing all about her, showing her the way: this is how to die. This is how to die. This is how to die—

Sivakami flings herself against the steep embankment, reaching for a pole sticking out of it. Her body flat against the slope, she pulls herself up, toes pushing like a gecko’s into crumbling dust, fingers grasping, beyond the pole, for the thin grass and roots. Her hands have reached flat ground when suddenly her toes slide away on something slick: the railway is everyman’s toilet and Sivakami loses her toehold in some malnourished tot’s leavings even as, with a thud, the beast of her possible deliverance arrives to flatten the space she left behind, singing, Don’t you want to die? Don’t you want to die? Sivakami slides back down to meet her fate, flashing beneath her feet, but then she hits the pole. She wraps herself around it, clinging upside down like a baby monkey to its mother.

As the train passes, a thousand startled travellers crane out their windows to gawk back at the little Brahmin widow, her dust-stained sari blown from her stubbly head. Their bewilderment almost matches her own. She has always thought of her life as a series of submissions to God. What if she has been making her own decisions all along?

The train has passed. Elation and disappointment pound in her head like the waters of the ocean she never saw. She steps down to collect her brass jug from where it fell to one side of the track, then she climbs again, slowly, from the moat, by stepping on stones and wildflower patches. She has eluded death—why did she do that?

She collects her breath and, trembling, waits for the sound of waves to subside. It doesn’t. She is hearing water.

It’s her beloved and reviled Kaveri. She leaves the track and walks over a hillock toward the sound, passes through a parting in some brush, and there it is, familiar and unknowable as ever. She fills her brass jug, and rinses the film from her eyes, the dust from her skin, and the residue of recent adventures from the soles of her feet. Her exhilaration is ebbing. Did she defeat her god? Is she now truly alone?

Sivakami glances up from her thoughts to see one of her Cholapatti neighbours—Visalakshi, from three doors down—coming toward her, a friendly but puzzled expression on her face. Oh, she has been spotted, now everyone will know. What is Visalakshi doing here?