The Toss of a Lemon (91 page)

From the back of the salon, she watches the hubbub of neighbours part to make way for a man she now recognizes as her grandfather. His high and distracted beauty has not altered, though his face is lined and hair grey. He flutters and booms greetings to the crowd and the family.

Janaki feels faint. Bharati looks at her, alarmed, and makes the same signal as Sivakami did—a fist shaken, thumb out, emphasized with a thrust of the chin—
What’s going on?

Janaki signals her back with a hand flipped, fingers spread, bewildered and accusatory:
How would I know?

“Ho, ho!” Goli is making his way through the crowd of Cholapatti Brahmins, offering namaskarams. “Yes, quite a while!” he says to one stiff greeting. “Very well!” he answers another coldly formal inquiry. “Very, extraordinarily, well.”

Goli’s clothes are worn, he carries no briefcase, no walking stick. Janaki cannot imagine where he has been all this time, and with whom, and shudders to think what he has been doing. She wonders if he held on to his job with the government.

Vairum has risen. He walks across the room to the garden door, and Muchami steps back as he holds his hand out over the ground and washes it with a tumbler of water, all without taking his eyes off Goli. He wants to see Goli see Bharati, Janaki realizes. He has set this up.

“And you, Vairum!” Goli crows. “Your man told me you had come around and I’m here to tell you bygones are bygones, but don’t think you’re getting off that easy.” He spies lunch. “Don’t mind if I do ...” As Bharati rises, though, he halts cartoonishly, mid-stride, and then tries to fling himself back into the crowd. “Is that the time? Duty calls, my friends! Lovely to have seen you!”

But the crowd won’t part. Janaki sees faces she doesn’t know—has Vairum enlisted help? Goli can’t get out.

“Amma!” Vairum calls. “Come! Some visitors!”

Sivakami thinks she hears Goli’s voice. It can’t be. He hasn’t come since Thangam died; her sons do the yearly death anniversary rites for her. Sivakami has trained herself not to think of him.

She peeps out from the pantry. It is Goli. Well, she must feed him. She sees Muchami, at the garden door. Why doesn’t he look glad? She is glad. Goli can do no more harm now, and what does no harm does good. Children need a father. Why is she shaking like this? And are these tears running down both her cheeks? She can’t tell: one of her cheeks feels numb.

“Amma!” Vairum calls.

Vairum has called her “mother.” How long has it been?
All is forgiven.

“Come!” he calls.

Now: no Brahmin widow walks through her main hall in front of guests. How the neighbours would talk! But Sivakami is not the woman she used to be. Her house is not defiled—this is not her house. And she left her fear walking a train track near Thiruchi. She can’t lose her son the way she lost her husband: without a word. She goes to Vairum.

“This is a great day!” Vairum proclaims to all assembled, arms outstretched, as Sivakami stands hunched beside him, twisting her fingers. “Finally, all my prolific brother-in-law’s known kin are gathered.”

Bharati, ashen, crosses the room to the garden door. Muchami fetches a brass jug of water and pours water for her to wash her hands. Janaki throbs in sympathy with her friend’s embarrassment. Vairum should not have invited her, she thinks, but Bharati never should have accepted.

Sivakami looks very small as Vairum leans toward her. “You have, in marvellous conscience, sheltered and raised all of my sister’s children by this man, but this man has at least one more child and she, too, deserves to be recognized, don’t you think, Amma? You, who have such concern for the children of this village, who has ensured all of them survive their passage safely into this great world? Can we make up for what this cad has wrought? He killed my sister, robbed me of caste, never gave his children any more than a paltry legitimacy and didn’t even give Bharati that. Let us make it right. Let us admit the truth. All together.”

Sivakami can feel a numbness spreading through her left side but not quickly enough to prevent her from understanding what he has said. He hates me, and now she sees why. This poor girl had no father; none of Thangam’s children had a father; her son had no father.
It was all my fault;
she deprived them all of the fathers they should have had. Vairum had no children—
also
my fault. She never should have permitted the marriage with Vani.
He was young;
I
should have decided for him what was best.

Yes, let me shoulder the blame.
Maybe now Vairum will stop blaming himself, throw away the knife he has used all his life to cut his own great heart into bits.

She sees Muchami step into the main hall, open his mouth and raise a hand, but then she sees him collapse.

He has brought us here, thinks Janaki, running forward with everyone else, to shatter us.

WE WERE NOT SHATTERED, but that’s what my mother told me she thought, so I have recorded it here. I myself didn’t know what to think at the time, but having now thought through these events, I suspect that Vairum Mama, in spite of all his disregard for Brahmins, might have thought he was doing something good for Bharati. Vairum was both a man of honour and one governed by his grudges, and certainly a gesture that would both force Goli to do the right thing and take revenge on my great-grandmother for whatever pain Vairum Mama thought she had caused him—it must have been irresistible.

I don’t know what he thought of the aftermath: we were all watching Sivakami Patti, who appeared at first not to be responding. She swayed a little, and the room, which had been silent, started buzzing. Everyone swarmed her, and my uncle Raghavan took her arm firmly and led her to the kitchen to lie down. No one would look at Vairum Mama and I don’t remember what he did, because suddenly there were shouts from the garden door: Muchami was lying on his side, his eyes rolling. I was near the door and saw Vairum pick the old servant up himself and put him in the car. Sivakami Patti would not have seen this. Vairum drove Muchami to a hospital: he had suffered a stroke and lost the use of his left side. It wasn’t until a few minutes after Vairum had left that we all realized Sivakami Patti had also had a stroke, also lost the use of her left side. We had to borrow a car to get her to a hospital. I wonder if Vairum was troubled by not having been the one to look after her in that moment, as he had cared for his sister and all of us.

Others had already largely taken over Muchami’s functions as regarded the lands, as well as occasional repairs and whitewashing of Sivakami Patti’s house. Now they took over responsibility for her one cow and little bit of garden. At least half the year, though, Sivakami Patti would stay with us in Pandiyoor or with one of my aunts. When she was in Cholapatti, one of them would go and stay with her, as much for company as for care: Minister Mama died not three months after that summer, and Gayatri Mami relocated to Madras, where she lived in her eldest son’s house. She never shaved her head or gave up contact with her grandchildren, though: times had changed, and widows didn’t much do that any more. She visited Cholapatti a couple of times after that but would stay with her cousin in Kulithalai. Their sons sold off their house and their few remaining lands, so their family, in that generation, effectively severed all relations to the village. This was already the case for at least four other households on the Brahmin quarter by that time.

I moved to Canada, married to a man who had grown up on the same street in Thiruchi where my Saradha Athai lived. His family, too, had sold their house—to non-Brahmins, as those distinctions became increasingly eroded by economic pressures. Even Pandiyoor’s Brahmin quarter would remain “intact,” as my mother would have it—I would say unintegrated—only a few years more. My future husband’s parents moved into a small apartment, and a few weeks after that, he left for Canada on a graduate scholarship, off to find a means to earn and support his family back in India.

My husband and I would eventually sponsor my twin brothers to emigrate, and they would bring my parents, who had run aground financially along with so many of their peers—the lands gone, the privilege gone with it. We were among the increasing numbers of displaced Tamil Brahmins whose stories were superficially different and fundamentally the same. Many of them brought with them their misguided race pride. They hope that here, we might rise again.

Bharati’s story was different. The Cholapatti revelation never made it into the news-that photographer had not stayed to hear it and the Brahmin-quarter denizens must have held their tongues. Certainly, they had known the rumours all along. A couple of years later, she married a radical journalist and together they started a new magazine of popular opinion, satirical humour and cutting-edge fiction. She and her husband moved to a rambling house in Adyar, near the beach, far from my great-uncle’s house, though I assume they still moved in similar social circles. I doubt they ever spoke about what had transpired that afternoon.

My mother wrote to me of Sivakami Patti’s death in 1966. I received the aerogram weeks after her passing. At that point, Muchami was already several years gone. Sivakami Patti was staying in Pandiyoor when she heard the news of her old servant’s passing and she went immediately to take a ritual bath, dousing herself with water as one does only for the death of a close relative. My mother wrote and told me this, too; I think she had been almost puzzled by her own feelings about Muchami’s death until she saw her grandmother’s gesture.

I remember once, when I was in college, my cousin Shyama came to visit me. He had not gone on to finish his education—despite his performance in tenth, he ran away right after that summer in Cholapatti. He returned five years later, taking us all by surprise, and came to visit Thiruchi, where I was in my final year of a physics degree. My marriage was already arranged; I would be leaving for Canada at the end of the year.

We had gone to my favourite temple, the Rock Fort, climbed to the top and were sitting looking out on the Kaveri plain as he told me about people he had met, movements he had been part of. I wasn’t sure how much to believe—I wanted to delight in his adventures but had an inkling that the truth might be grimmer, or duller, and I preferred merely to hear the story he wanted to tell.

I think it was then that I realized I would need, at some point, to try to tell the events of my family’s life. Because as he spoke, I imagined between us a huge, illustrated book. The illustration showed us, sitting high on a rock temple, the valley of the Kaveri spread below us. The ornate, block-printed text told the story of Shyama’s adventures—as they really were, not as he was telling them. I felt that if I might turn back a few chapters, I would see Shyama and myself as children; a few more chapters and I would see my mother as a child; a few more and I might see Sivakami, coming to Cholapatti as a child bride. Maybe I could cross out some passages and scribble in the margins, make Vairum kind to his mother, or make Hanumarathnam live in spite of his horoscope.

Or maybe I would try, and find I could change nothing on the page, that all I could do was tell it differently, and maybe I would understand it better for that—the story of a world that, while it has not vanished, for those who know how to see, no longer exists for most of us.

And my story, too, may no longer exist for those who lived it, because it is in English and they knew only Tamil, maybe some Sanskrit. In any case, it’s not the story they would have told. The tale has transmuted, passed from my great-grandmother into my mother into me, from old world into new, little piles of ash, little piles of gold, a couple of long-petrified lemons—an inheritance I carry around and read alone as I did those novels of long ago.

So it is that I sit here with you, the book of our lives between us, telling my story, and my people’s, in lands and languages I know but that are not my own.

The Toss of a Lemon,
while fictional, grew from stories told me by my grandmother, Dhanam Kochoi. I often asked my mother, Bhuvana Viswanathan, to translate, explain or elaborate; she and my dad, S. P. Viswanathan, answered countless questions on details and customs. The heart of this novel is, in many ways, as much theirs as my own. The rest of my Manathattai, Sholavandan and Senapratti families also contributed knowledge and histories, as did friends. I particularly thank Ravi Kumar, Vaidhehi Kumar, Lakshmi Athai, Janaki Athai, Ecchemu Athai, Sethurathnam (Ambi) Chithappa, Shyamala Chitthi, Dr. Ramaswamy, Sukumar Anna, Sujatha Akka, Raju Anna, Raju Mama, Pattu Mami, Kitcha Mama, Padma Mami, Vasantha Murthy, Nagy Nageswaran, Christine Agrawal, Dipak Saraswati, Raji Athai, Meenakshi Athai, Chellu Mama, Seetharaman Periappa, Visali Athai, Krishnan Chitthappa, Radhu Chitthi, Indhi Athai, Venketu Mama and my other grandmother, Vijayalakshmi Patti. Some of these dear ones have passed on since I began this endeavour; I hope I have honoured their memories.

Many books and articles assisted me in the writing of this work, but I must make special mention of S. Theodore Baskaran’s
The Message Bearers: Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880-1945,
Eugene Irschick’s
Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929,
Saskia Kersenboom’s
Nityasumangali:
Devadasi Tradition in South Asia, Rajagopal Parthasarathy’s translation of The
Cilappatikaram of Ilanko
Atikal, R. K. Narayan’s Ramayana, K. S. Narayanan’s Friendships
and
Flashbacks and M. S. S. Pandian’s The Image Trap. The siddhas’ song is an amalgamation of various songs translated in Kamil V. Zvelebil’s The Poets of the Powers. Those kind enough to share their expertise in person include V. Amarnath, S. Theodore Baskaran, Eugene Irschick, K. S. Narayanan and family, Rajagopal Parthasarathy, M. S. S. Pandian, S. Ramaswamy, K. V. Ramanathan and A. R. Venkatachalapathy. Their scholarship and storytelling propelled me toward a more complex understanding of my subjects than I otherwise could have achieved.