The Toss of a Lemon (19 page)

He ignored Muchami’s invitation to go on rounds with him; he kept out of sight of the children gathered round his sister on the veranda; he thrashed and screamed when Muchami and Sivakami said it was time they registered him for school. He played less; he whined more. On the tenth day, the whining, too, ceased.

When Sivakami asks him why he is sitting near the front door—still out of sight of passersby—he tells her he is waiting.

“Waiting for what, my dear one?”

“Waiting to go home to my Samanthibakkam,” he answers, impatient and helpless.

She cannot touch him and cannot help him, and so she turns away.

The next morning, as Vairum is mumbling his prayers in front of the Ramar, Sivakami notices a speckling of white from his armpit to his shoulder blade. He is shirtless following his bath, as prescribed, and wearing a fresh dhoti. She comes closer, thinking he must have spilt some holy ash, though it seems a strange place to manage to spill it. There is none on his neck or shoulder. She comes close, squints and reaches out her hand. She doesn’t care if she has to take another bath; she catches her son with her left hand and rubs the spray of white freckles, hard, with the other. They don’t come off.

Vairum, shocked at her touch, shrugs her now-trembling hand away and then tries to see what she is looking at.

“What is it, Amma?” he asks, annoyed.

“Nothing,” she murmurs with a stiff smile, though she is already muttering horrified prayers against leprosy, sotto voce. “It’s nothing. Finish your prayers.”

Some hours later, she hears a female voice, and Vairum’s in response. It couldn’t be Thangam, because Thangam hardly talks, and it couldn’t be a neighbour, because Vairum doesn’t talk to the neighbours. Sivakami moves to the pantry and looks before she is seen. A young girl, probably fifteen years old, is laughing, addressing her son. Though Vairum looks bashful, he doesn’t seem to resent her. The girl tosses her head and then notices Sivakami, who moves out toward her.

“I’m Gayatri. I’m married, up the street, you know. The big house.” She smiles, forthright, friendly, and hands over the fruit she has brought.

Ah, Minister’s bride. She had not yet come to join her husband when Sivakami left Cholapatti. A Kulithalai girl, she didn’t have far to come. “You’re married to Chinnarathnam’s son?” Sivakami eyes Gayatri’s strong shoulders and good height. Her sari is of an excellent silk.

“I used to come for holidays when you lived here—before, I mean—but I was just a kid, so you probably don’t remember me. But now I’m a proper lady of the house and all.”

“I came to your wedding,” Sivakami tells her, feeling drawn to Gayatri’s liveliness. “Do you know how indebted I am to your father-in-law, how much he helped me, when we were away, and our house was vulnerable to thieves?” She is glad for a chance to revisit this debt. “My husband had great respect for him.”

“Oh, so do I. He’s eased my homesickness so much. He’s such fun, a real father to me.” Gayatri casts around for a place to sit.

Vairum is once more gazing gloomily at the door.

“Hey, bright eyes,” Gayatri addresses him as she claims a spot against a post, waving away Sivakami’s offer of a mat. “Why don’t you get us a tumbler of water?”

Sivakami clucks and hurries to do this herself but notices that Vairum, without changing his expression, was rising to obey the newcomer.

Sivakami returns with snacks and water, for Gayatri and Vairum. She takes another plateful out to Thangam and the crowd of children that play quietly around her as though Thangam’s gravity weighs down their wildness. She returns to her guest with a bit of the usual apprehension. This girl didn’t know Hanumarathnam and so won’t try to ferret out and share Sivakami’s grief. Sivakami calculates that she’ll be one of the curious ones, and summons those of her stock responses most successful in forestalling questions.

But Gayatri doesn’t dig for the reasons Sivakami has returned to Cholapatti. She talks about her own family and married life, what she enjoys, what bothers her. Polite and interested, she asks Sivakami questions about herself for an hour or so before announcing regretfully that she must return to home and chores.

“I’ll come again tomorrow. Do you need anything?” she asks. “Anything your servant can’t get you?”

Sivakami can’t think of anything. She hasn’t had a conversation as such since she left Samanthibakkam. Her loneliness is more acute for having been briefly relieved; the sick feeling of worry over that archipelago sparkling on Vairum’s back also reintensifies.

Gayatri asks Vairum, “Do you play
palanguzhi,
loudmouth? Something about you makes me think you’ll be good at it. You can count, can you? Add, multiply?”

Vairum takes a second, then assents.

“I’ll bring my board tomorrow when I come,” she says. “You better be here, got that? No gallivanting with those roughnecks outside, no school, no going back wherever you were before. We have an appointment, you and me. Okay, sport?

“Bye, Akka,” she says to Sivakami, using “big sister” as an honorific, as opposed to “aunt.” Gayatri apparently has decided Sivakami is more friend than elder. “Send your man if there’s anything you need from me.”

After she leaves, Sivakami and Vairum raise their eyebrows at each other. He continues to dream by the door, and Sivakami feels a bit lighter as she goes about her chores. She determines that she will ask Gayatri’s father-in-law, Chinnarathnam, what to do about Vairum’s condition.

It is in those days that the letter from Hanumarathnam’s sisters arrives. The sisters had sent it first to Sivakami at her father’s house, and Sivakami’s brothers had sent it on.

Safe.

Sivakami folds the letter and goes out back to the courtyard where Muchami sits on the stones, taking his mid-morning meal. He is still on the first course, rice with okra sambar, and a fried plantain curry.

“More sambar?” she asks. “Curry?” She prefers to serve him, unusual as that is for a Brahmin mistress, though she keeps a decorous distance even while she does.

“Sambar,” he nods.

She fetches and serves it from a small blackened iron jar that she holds with tongs. “So tell me what happened when my sisters-in-law came to see about the house.”

“Ayoh, Rama, that’s right, we were interrupted when I started telling you about it before.” He signals that he has enough by holding his hand above his rice. “Why did you give them the old key?”

“I didn’t know why they wanted to get into the house.” She puts the sambar back in the kitchen and returns with more rice on a plate.

“Podhail.”

Sivakami straightens. “What?”

“Buried treasure. I’m sure of it.” He’s ready for more rice, which she pushes onto the now-cleared space on his banana leaf. “Remember—” He pauses, unwilling to upset her, but continues softly, “Ayya’s last word?”

Hanumarathnam’s head falls back, exhaling a word...
Sivakami has thought back on that moment dozens of times in the years since it happened. If it had been night, and they had been alone, she would have been at his side. She doesn’t think he could have said anything important: he spent so long in preparation for his death and was so methodical.

“It might have been anything,” she mumbles, swiping at her left eye, which had started to tear, and going back into the kitchen with a sniff.

“A lot of people thought he said ‘podhail,’” he explains.

“Including my sisters-in-law, you think?” she asks from the kitchen.

He has carved a well in the mound of rice for ghee and rasam, and Sivakami fetches these and pours them in.

He scoops and presses his rice to mix in the lemony broth. “I’m sure of it. They tried first on their own, then sent for me when they discovered they had the wrong key. When they learned I didn’t have any key at all, they had their manservants climb into the garden. With spades. I felt really torn, because this is not their house, and I’m supposed to be keeping it from harm. So I asked, Have you come to do some gardening? ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Gardening.’”

Sivakami squats on her haunches in the kitchen door as he continues.

“I think they must have been planning to inspect the floor of the house to see if there was any seam, you know, some place that had been dug and then bricked over. But they had only the garden. The servants were lazy buggers, pardon me, so at first they said there was nowhere to dig. But the ladies and gentlemen were so anxious, they called the servants back and
had themselves helped over the wall.
Can you picture it? Your sisters-in-law, with their great big—” he indicates with his hands the width of the sisters’ widest parts—“in their nine-yard saris, and, ayoh, Rama. Not to be disrespectful. Curry?”

Sivakami brings it, on a plate. “Then?”

“I went over with them, what else could one do? The garden was a mess, of course, with fallen fruit and rotting coconuts. I said it was very nice of them to take care of it. I was thinking that if you weren’t coming back, what was the point? Let it grow over, like it did after their parents died. When little Vairum returns to take his house, then is the time to clear the garden.”

“They wouldn’t have accepted such advice from you.”

“That’s why I didn’t say anything. I helped them to clear the garden.”

“Oh, I thought you had done all that in anticipation of my return,” Sivakami responds, bringing more rice and then yogourt.

“Well, I would have, when you told me you were coming back, but no, in fact, all this happened a month before. It’s when they ordered the manservants to dig that I remembered your husband’s final word.
Thokku?”

Sivakami goes to fetch a dollop of the condiment and deposits it on one side of his banana leaf. She trusts Muchami absolutely, so she has no worry about discussing the possibility of buried treasure with him.

“If my husband thought there was treasure here, he would never have waited to tell us from his deathbed.”

“You’re right, I say.” Muchami takes a mouthful of food. “They would have dug up the whole garden, but I pleaded for the trees. They said what’s the point, it would be fifteen years before Vairum returned, but I begged, I’m telling you, and so they just dug around the roots and after each one I would pack the soil back in. I didn’t ask any more questions. Anyway, all the weeds got cleared.”

“Yes, it looks very tidy,” Sivakami says wryly.

“So, at the end of the day, the sisters and husbands are barking at one another, the servants are dirty and sweaty, none of them have eaten since morning, and they’re no richer. We all go back over the wall. They go to Murthy’s house to bathe and eat, and I’m sure they must have told Murthy’s mother the real reason, or she guessed. So then, my sources tell me, they hit on the idea that they should go talk to Jagganathan. About what he saw.”

This was the boy who once followed Hanumarathnam to spy on him with the siddhas, and lost his voice in the adventure.

“Did I tell you that, since your husband died, he’s got his voice back?” Muchami folds the bottom half of his now-empty banana leaf over the top, picks it up, stands and belches and goes to throw the leaf out the back door of the courtyard.

Sivakami squats against the house, under the eave. “Mm-hm, you told me. He didn’t discover it for some months, until he stubbed his toe and yelled.”

“After so many years without use, it was more of a croak. He still doesn’t talk much—he’s out of the habit. But that mother of Murthy’s was inspired to ask him. Now that your husband is gone, maybe, she thought, he wouldn’t be afraid to talk about what he saw.”

“They thought he would say he saw my husband turning lumps of clay into bricks of gold, and so our house and garden have golden bedrock?”

Muchami rinses his mouth with well water and pours a half-bucket over the spot where he just ate, a Brahmin habit he has picked up in this house, cleansing the spot not only of a little spilled rice, but of the largely theoretical contaminations of cooked food, a horror to Brahmins for obscure reasons.

“Jagganathan probably knew what they wanted, but he wasn’t talking. If he couldn’t have such a reward, he who had suffered so much, why should they? I saw them after, glum faces...”

“Don’t be gleeful,” Sivakami tut-tuts. “It’s not classy.”

He smirks. “Then they went home.”

Sivakami rests a cheek on her knee, frowning in thought. “The soil is all turned, it’s a good time to put in some new plants...”

He’s a little puzzled at the switch in topic but goes along with his mistress. “When?”

Three days later, a jack tree, two papaya trees, a banana tree and a rose bush are delivered to Sivakami’s house. Muchami had told the tree vendor that the lady of the house wanted them to come to the front, strange as that may seem. When he arrives, the whole street sees Sivakami telling the shrubbery parade that no, they are mistaken, come around the house to the back, oh, okay, come into the garden through the front hall, then. Muchami does the planting and she supervises.

That evening she calls a scribe to pen a letter to her sisters-in-law:

Safe.