The Toss of a Lemon (18 page)

The third says, “We will keep an eye on him, before the ceremony.”

They all wag. They drink.

The fourth says, “He won’t try this again.”

They drink. The youngest says, “We won’t let him.”

They all wag. They drink deeply. Rasu, the second eldest, says nothing. His lips, plum-coloured and full in the manner of that country, are pressed into a rigid frown. But he is reassured.

They had planned this as a day of relaxation and overconsumption. They decide they may as well stick to that plan. Together they drink, and when sufficiently past satiation, sleep off the day in the shade of the toddy palms. The youngest gets fresh with the bar matron. She rebuffs him good-naturedly with a lot of crude language and he passes out, smiling. The others accuse her of cutting slits in the leaves used to make the cups, to force them to drink her swill too quickly. She calls them a bunch of fucking fabulists. They show her the leaks. She punches two or three in the face, tells them to suck the outside of the cups and that’s the end of the matter.

MUCHAMI SLOUGHED OFF HIS MARITAL OBLIGATIONS, but he would never be so cavalier with his job. He doesn’t come home but still makes his daily rounds and so is easily traced. His uncles come after him one day and forcibly remove him home, soiling his blindingly white dhoti in the operation and causing him to lose his favourite walking stick. Angamma boxes his ears, which does nothing to improve his frame of mind.

A new date for the wedding is established. In the days leading up to it, one of Muchami’s five uncles accompanies him at all times. They think of their security detail as assisting their nephew to live up to his commitments. It’s the sort of thing family does. Uncles and nephew have always enjoyed one another’s company and these days in fact pass pleasantly for all of them.

The evening before the marriage, Muchami invites his uncles to the toddy palms. He never touches the stuff himself, but he knows how they enjoy it. The uncles appreciate his thoughtfulness and get drunk. They accompany Muchami back to their sister’s house. She’s disgusted with them. They tease her and prepare to share the final vigil. The youngest will watch for the first two hours while the others sleep. He will then wake the third, who will watch for two hours before passing the responsibility to the next eldest and so on. The father of the bride is exempt this evening. The three settle down to sleep and the youngest to watch. Muchami lies on his back beside this uncle and chats with him. The other three uncles approvingly fall into a peaceful sleep. After they do so, Muchami pretends to fall asleep. Soon, he hears his youngest uncle’s resistance begin to falter. Tiny snores are interrupted by snuffles and the sound of him rising and pacing in an effort to stay awake. This carries on for a mere ten minutes before he succumbs. Sometime between then and daybreak, Muchami departs.

The feast is wasted again. The uncles are angry at one another and themselves and their sister, and she is angry with them. They are all furious at Muchami. The uncles find him again and, near brutal in their embarrassment, drag him home.

Muchami’s mother decides she can’t trust her brothers any more than she can trust her son. If the only obligation he feels deeply is to his employer, then the order to marry must come from her. She marches with a couple of her brothers down to the sub-judicial court veranda, where the scribes lounge in wait, and has a letter written and posted to Sivakami.

Sivakami had just determined on her return to Cholapatti, and sent a letter informing Muchami of that, which included an assurance for Angamma that, in accordance with her dharma as his employer and patron, she will do her utmost to ensure that Muchami treads the correct path.

She arrives and Muchami meets her at the train. Though there is gladness in his aspect, there is also something fugitive.

Sivakami has no idea why Muchami is behaving in this bizarre manner, but she assumes it is some sort of fear. She herself was afraid of marriage. Who isn’t? She will just appeal to his sense of duty; wasn’t that the reason her husband hired him, after all? Because he is the most trustworthy, hardworking, intelligent boy of his class in the district?

The day they arrive, she and the children take rest. The next day is spent in reviewing with Muchami the accounts and the state of the property. Sivakami is pleased and tells him so. He accepts this as his due. They intend to finish up the next morning, but on that day, Muchami is accompanied by Angamma and a couple of uncles, so other business must be delayed.

Sivakami holds court in the courtyard at the rear of the house. The uncles stand at a respectful but firm distance while Angamma screams and wails, tears her hair and pleads. She invokes the spirits of their dead husbands—with marginal propriety, in Sivakami’s opinion. It’s all very well to invoke one’s own dead husband, but invoking another’s seems a bit bold.

These people have a different manner from ours, Sivakami thinks, as she listens patiently. They are prone to displays of emotion, which Brahmins eschew. One must accept their theatrics, of equally alarming proportions in positive and negative circumstances, without giving them undue weight. Of course she will put her foot down, she reassures them, and receives Angamma’s histrionic gratitude in response.

Sivakami would have preferred to give Muchami the dignity of a private conference, but this is not a private matter. Mother and uncles keep their eyes stonily upon the recalcitrant Muchami as Sivakami raises her eyebrows at him. He stands, hands clasped respectfully before him, looking very tired of the whole business. Sivakami instructs, “You must obey your mother and marry your uncle’s daughter.”

Muchami looks at the ground.

Sivakami continues, “Your mother and uncle are going to fix another date and then there will be no more of this nonsense. How can I have a man working for me who is not married? It is my duty, as much as a parent’s, to make sure you live in a correct way. I forbid you to persist in this behaviour. And I give my whole and hearty blessings on your marriage.”

Angamma flings herself into blessings for Sivakami and her children and her children’s children. She and the uncles and a subdued Muchami depart.

After his rounds, Muchami returns to finish going over the accounts. He gives no sign of resenting the admonishment.

Angamma brooks no more delay. Within a week, the marriage is done. Sivakami is not invited to attend the marriage—as a Brahmin, she cannot attend lower-caste weddings (and as a widow, she cannot attend Brahmin weddings)—but she hears that all has proceeded in a satisfactory way.

Now all that remains is for the bride to come of age so the happy couple can be united physically, as they already have been spiritually.

IT’S BEEN TEN DAYS SINCE THEIR RETURN, and Vairum is sitting in the front hall, waiting to go back to the place where he was a happy child.

He had had fun on the first day, helping to gather coins from all over the main hall. They had even let him keep one that he inched out from a crack in the base of the Ramar statue. He tied it in the waist of his dhoti and is fingering it now.

The second day, he had gone out with Thangam. She took her old place on the veranda, while he circled the gathering children from behind. Half the crowd drew near her, half approached him. He could hear them, gently asking his sister questions to which she softly replied. The children around her got quieter and gentler. When they realized they would never coax her from the veranda, they settled around her, one girl holding her hand, another patting her hair, several others calmly sunning themselves in her presence.

The children who encircled Vairum were those who could not get near Thangam, and yet they seemed a different breed entirely.

“Hey, ratface!” one boy taunted in a low voice, poking Vairum in the side experimentally.

Vairum recoiled, shaken, but then thought to distract these potential playmates by asking the question that had started so many enjoyable hours in Samanthibakkam: “What have you got to trade?”

It was a simple question, but these children seemed not to understand. Vairum tried another. “Want me to add or subtract anything?”

They had grown silent but were still peering at him, moving closer and closer, until, of a moment, one’s hand reached out to tug his hair and another cried, “Boo!”

Vairum leaped from the veranda and broke into a run.

The children gave chase, straight down the length of the Brahmin quarter and past the temple onto one of the small paths leading into the farmlands. Vairum streaked ahead of them, wondering why he was running and where he was going and how he would find his way back afterward when his ankle caught on a root and he sailed into the road with such force that he slid a couple of feet.

He rolled onto his back and propped himself by inches until he was sitting, knees bent, bum dirty, wiping dust from his lips and teeth. The children were panting and laughing. One of his knees and the opposite elbow were badly scraped. A little girl with square, tough-looking features cuffed him, hard but not unaffectionately, on the head.

He shouted at them, “Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five times sixty-nine is one lakh, ninety-five thousand six hundred and fifteen!” and defiantly waited for them to be impressed.

They looked at one another, trying, apparently, to see how they should react. The boy who poked him first made a “cuckoo” sign, twirling his finger against his temple; another, hiking up his dust-stained dhoti, asked Vairum, “Yeah, so?”

But they didn’t stop him from trudging home. He wiped his nose so roughly on his dhoti that his eyes stung. He felt for the silver coin knocking warm and heavy against his hip, took it out and thought about how the children back in Samanthibakkam would appreciate it, what fun it would buy them on his return.

A blur of children were clustered at the front of his house. As he passed them to enter, a few wrinkled their noses and whispered, “Ratface!” A couple laughed. Thangam softly said, “Stop that,” and the children immediately around her froze in apology, but Vairum didn’t hear her and mounted their front steps without looking at his sister. He continued whispering a multiplication table: three thousand six hundred and fifty-four times two, times three, times two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five. He turned the silver coin over in his hand. He went inside and didn’t come out.

MANY NEIGHBOURS CAME TO CALL on Sivakami in those first days, curious and condoling. With some, the most pressing business was to find out why Sivakami had returned. Others came to shed tears, the weight of which they had borne since her departure, wishing her there to cry with them.

Questions and tears were equally intolerable for Sivakami. She tried her best to respond, though everything in her resisted. She could see that her neighbours were leaving unsatisfied, thinking she was aloof. The days left her drained, with very little energy for her son, who seemed content at first, keeping his solitary counsel in the hall, or pantry, or courtyard, doing arithmetic under his breath, sometimes playing marbles or dayakkattam or tic-tac-toe against himself, chalking all the necessary grids onto the courtyard bricks, like arcane, alchemical formulas. Muchami was too preoccupied to attend to the little boy at first, busy as he was settling Sivakami’s accounts and then settling his own accounts with his uncles regarding his marriage, but after a couple of days he began to join Vairum in the occasional game.

By the sixth of these long, confined days, the courtyard bricks were covered in chalk markings, and Vairum was bored and restless. When Sivakami suggested he might go see what the neighbourhood children were up to, his response was to run from her, to the front end of the main hall and back to the courtyard, and back and back, twelve or fifteen times, until his shoulders slumped and his breath rasped. Then he walked slowly past her, dragging his hand across the back of her thighs. She didn’t have the heart to reprimand him. She went to take a second bath, after which Vairum strolled past and slapped her knee. She bathed again. An hour before sunset, he rubbed her head.