The Toss of a Lemon (85 page)

THE FOLLOWING MARCH, she returns to Cholapatti, a month early because she is pregnant again, due in April. She has made one trip back in the meantime, in November, to visit Kamalam there, who just had her first baby. By the time Janaki gives birth to her twin boys—she and Baskaran compromised this time; the nurse was called but stayed in the courtyard, close at hand, until the babies were safely delivered—the house is full again with her siblings and their children. Laddu has so far refused to marry, but Sivakami has asked his sisters to convince him this summer. He is almost twenty-eight and, given how he has advanced through the ranks of Vairum’s concerns and how well he is now earning, a highly eligible bachelor. The women look forward to a little sport at his expense.

Only one concern mars the summer’s gaiety, and even that provides them with gossip: Mari has shown signs of increasing delusion and Vairum has been taking her for monthly treatments in Thiruchi. The young women of Sivakami’s household press Gayatri for details and she agrees to tell all of them but Radhai, the only one yet unmarried.

“Hysteria,” she says, looking at them meaningfully.

They look at her and one another, and then Sita makes a small sound of recollection. “I have heard of that.” She looks at her sisters suggestively. “Isn’t it... a complaint of a, you know, intimate nature?”

“Exactly. I don’t know exactly how long it has gone on, but it sounds like perhaps from the start of their marriage, Muchami and Mari never...”

She pauses and the young women lean in.

“Never had sexual congress.” Gayatri nods solemnly. “It’s a terrible thing. And now it has started to tell on her health.”

“Ayoh!” Saradha exclaims.

“It is terrible,” says Janaki, as Kamalam blushes, looking deeply reluctant to learn all this. “Poor thing.”

“So how is it treated?” Sita asks, with more curiosity than concern.

“A machine.” Gayatri uses the English word. “In the doctor’s office. My husband said he had seen advertisements for such things, in mail-order catalogues, way back. It does... it’s supposed to simulate what a husband should do.”

“Ayoh!” Saradha exclaims again, with greater feeling.

Janaki is silent now, full of pity for the both of them. Good old Muchami and his poor, striving wife. Whatever went wrong? Why did they never adopt? They should have had children. It might have saved Mari. She’s sure it would have, in fact. Maybe Vairum and Vani will give in and do that before Vani goes entirely the same way. If they don’t think of it themselves, though, she can’t think of anyone who would be brave enough to suggest it to them.

The treatments appear to be effective, Muchami admits. For a week or two after each one, Mari appears calmer, doesn’t drop things as much or fall down, and recognizes him as her husband. The effects ebb, though, and by the time she is due for another treatment, she once more cannot be trusted to cook or serve, and will call Muchami by odd names, sometimes male, sometimes female, and accuse him of histories and doings that are plainly not his.

He is so ashamed, and it is worse for not knowing how he is and is not to blame. He, who has always held duty above all, failed to perform this sacred duty for his wife. He tried, a couple of times, but she rejected him, saying they had agreed: theirs was a celibate marriage. He was grateful, because he had not been confident that he would succeed in satisfying her. He loves her, but much as he loves his younger sisters. He was frankly repulsed by the idea of intimate contact. Perhaps she rejected him because she sensed that.

Inasmuch as he is her husband, though, he is responsible for her health and care. He had taken her to see a number of healers before finally turning in desperation to Vairum. The doctor Vairum took them to see was the first who tried to probe the malady’s causes, instead of treating symptoms. Muchami had always feared that their lack of conjugal relations would in some way return to haunt him, and the diagnosis was both a relief and a deep humiliation. He returned feeling unmanned, a feeling that intensified with Mari’s first treatment. He waited in the small vestibule of the office—Vairum, mercifully, had dropped them off and said he would return in an hour—while Mari was inside on the doctor’s table. Muchami listened to the whir of the machine and then Mari’s cries, escalating. They reminded him of his childhood, when, a couple of times, he spied on neighbours at night. This was the first time since then that he had heard a woman orgasm.

He could feel Sivakami waiting, the next day, for his report on this latest effort. She had been among the first to witness Mari’s difficulties, and had been his confidant as he searched for a means to cure her. He had been mum on the results of the consultation with the doctor, except for telling her, when she served his morning meal, that he thought the doctor might have some idea what was wrong. Sivakami had not probed for details.

“That’s good,” she said gently, not incurious but trusting him to say what he could, looking at him with such compassion that he was almost tempted to confess.

It had made him feel strange about their relationship in a way he never had before. He has never thought their closeness odd; rather, it was the natural result of their shared life’s work. He is so grateful now, though, for the succour of her friendship, something none of his male friends can give him, nor, clearly, his wife. Unlike them, she knows nothing of his inclinations, and yet she feels what he feels, because their missions, their heartbreaks, their triumphs have so long been twinned.

He had nodded at her, and she smiled a little and went to fetch more rice for him as he sighed, exhausted from concern but now resting for a moment in their precious, private complicity.

JANAKI UNFOLDS THE NEWSPAPER and comes face to face with a face she last saw in front of the Madurai chattram, seven years earlier, before the palanquin curtains fell and ended the scene.

She feels the need to smooth her kitchen-puffed hair and re-pleat her sari pallu, which is crumpled and tucked like a crying infant over her shoulder and into her waist. She feels as skinny and provincial as she did as a child, when Bharati used to look past her much as she is now looking past Janaki from Janaki’s lap.

The photo accompanies an article, and half of the page opposite is taken up with a movie advertisement. It has a border composed of a drawing of Bharati in a three-quarter view expressing pleasure and dismay as though in response to a declaration of illicit love, blending into the valiant leading man, and then into the conniving, mustachioed villain. These images twist like a vine from a tableau along the bottom: Bharati, flowing hair escaping her widow’s whites as she wrenches her wrist from one of the men.

The article in Dinamani is a packet of the standard glowing rot: “Miss Bharati, the product of a modest, middle-class home in Kulithalai, always had a great love of music and was encouraged by her mother and father to pursue it seriously. Of course, her parents expected her to perform at home only, but Miss Bharati has taken a vow to marry her art only. She has been most inspired by the example of Sri Rukmini Devi, alias Mrs. Arundale, whose thrilling debut onto the Madras stage helped Miss Bharati to convince her doting parents that the Indian classical arts can and must be practised by respectable girls. ‘It is a necessary step in the building of an independent, modern nation,’ said Miss Bharati, an ardent nationalist, who is twenty years complete.” Janaki wonders if the paper colluded or was duped into knocking eight years off Bharati’s age.

She folds the paper and lies back on the low, narrow cot she has had built for the women’s room. She has done the kolam, bathed, dressed and fed her children, sent Thangajothi off to school, consulted with the kitchen staff and overseen the start of the day’s preparations. The servants should be leaving any minute with her twin sons, taking them back to their village just as she went back to Muchami’s. This gives her a precious half-hour to look through the newspaper before taking a bath, doing her puja and giving the Sanskrit tutorial at the paadasaalai. She’s excited these days because there is one new pupil who is quite talented. His gifts took her by surprise because his skin is so dark: she didn’t think he looked so bright when he arrived. Now, she finds herself planning special challenges for him, just as young Kesavan did for her and Bharati.

Her sons, Sundar and Amarnath, active two-year-olds, gallop in, damp and toasty from playing in the garden. Every day, they come in at this time and act as though it were a delightful surprise to find her, nearly prone, vulnerable to their attack. Today, they cheer: “Hip hip hooray!” She wonders if they learned the English syllables from their cousin Shyama, a bright boy bound for a bad end. Hers are good boys, she can tell already, and they will remain so if she can keep them from bad influences: Amarnath, a reflective boy who she hopes will outgrow his propensity to cry easily, and Sundar, a resilient bouncy sort who will certainly try his teachers and be beaten but never broken. They are inseparable, which as far as she is concerned is only good.

They throw themselves on her, Sundar with a roar, Amarnath with a squeak, and she submits, pressing their heads to her to quiet them, because grandchildren are not among Senior Mami’s interests. Thankfully, she hears the servants call that the prams are ready to go. She kisses the boys and pulls from under the cot a box of wooden blocks they can take with them. The blocks are painted with English letters ; Baskaran bought them in Madurai last year.

She returns to wondering how long it will be before Clouds in the Eyes, Bharati’s debut vehicle, comes through Pandiyoor with one of the touring talkies.

Janaki used to say she had never been to the cinema; now she says she has not been yet. She waited until the most conservative families on the Brahmin quarter started permitting their children before she would consider it for hers, though she still has not gone, nor has Thangajothi. Movie-going doesn’t cause the gossip it might have once, but it’s one of Janaki’s points of pride to do everything possible to uphold conservative values in their household.

Folding the newspaper with a noisy yawn, she curls onto her side for a catnap. Clouds in the Eyes, she decides, will be her debut experience, too.

At half past three, Thangajothi arrives home from school, cranky because she is ravenous, and unwilling, as always, to eat. She’s a bright girl, but complicated. With her is her cousin, Shyama, who is singing.

“Caw! Caw! Caw!” he bellows, the refrain of one of the season’s most popular songs.

Sundar leaps and hinges himself to Shyama’s side, Amarnath falls in behind. They’ve already joined in the chorus, a terrible, joyful caw-caw-phony. Janaki ignores them in the way of young mothers, wearing her authority with little grace. She fetches balls of thaingai maavu and instructs them to break bananas off the stalk in the pantry, pulls Thangajothi onto her lap and force-feeds her while Shyama entertains them.

He went to the touring talkies last night with his elder brothers, neither of whom made it to college, but who make it to the movies several times a month. Shyama is the youngest child of one of Baskaran’s sisters. She married into Tamapakkam, Pandiyoor’s other half, across the Vaigai. The groom turned out to be a Communist, which unfortunately resulted in an aversion to work, a love of sloganeering, and a pressing desire to give away his inheritance the moment it dropped into his hands. As a result, he has a lifetime honorary membership in the Communist Party and several unions for trades he has never practised while his family lives on what Baskaran can eke out for his sister by investing the dowry her husband naturally refused. She had capitulated to her husband in naming their first three children—Stalin and Lenin, and a daughter, Russia—but insisted the last have the name of her favourite composer, Shyama Sastri.

Shyama spends more waking time in Janaki’s house than in his own, because the food and the audiences are so much better. As he snacks, he renders for them, line by line, note by scene, the film he saw last night, one of the year’s causes
célèbres.
It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister’s wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn’t know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her.

Shyama acts out all the scenes with verve and conviction but reserves a special energy for the songs, whose lyrics are full of attempts at political subversion. One, a siddha song, goes, “If a rich man tells a lie, it will be taken as a truth ... Money makes leaders of fools... Even when crying over a dead body, watch your pockets!” The song Shyama had been singing when he entered the house asks why all men cannot simply share with their brethren, the way crows do.

“Caw! Caw! Caw! Beggars fight for food in the trash, while the mighty fight for money! Crows always call one another to share food, but people, never... Caw! Caw! Caw!”

“But children, look.” Janaki sees an opening. “Crows call other crows to eat. They’re not calling sparrows and ducks and monkeys. We all look after our own families, our own community,” Janaki points out, confident in her logic. “You see? Brahmins look after Brahmins, non-Brahmins after their own sort.”

“Communists are different,” Shyama retorts.

“Don’t talk back,” returns Janaki. A pause follows. “Drink your milk.”

Shyama, unoffended, continues the story. The political content of the film becomes increasingly pointed, including specific references to up-and-coming champions of the DMK, newest party in Tamil nationalism, though it is lost on him.