The Toss of a Lemon (32 page)

SO LOOK AT VAIRUM, a college student, married to the girl who will become the woman of his dreams. At first glance, it would seem he is becoming exactly what his mother intended when she tore him from Samanthibakkam and reinstalled him in Cholapatti, sacrificing his happiness on his behalf. If he had known what he would receive in return for his suffering, would he himself have placed his contentment on the altar? None of us will ever know.

He lives in the carapace of a happy young man. He has routines that build on his interests and skills, that give his life the appearance of balance. At college, he works hard and is rewarded with knowledge, honours and respect. He has friends.

One of those boys is distantly related to two wealthy merchant families in Cholapatti and goes there for weekends from time to time, since his own family lives in Thanjavur, a bit far to travel for such a short break. When his friend visits, Vairum is invited to be a fourth for tennis at the Kulithalai club and finds it a pleasant diversion at the end of a long day spent in studies and land management. He begins to frequent the club whenever he is home for the weekend, becoming a regular in singles and doubles within a rotating set of sons and fathers of the landed classes. Often he stops on the way home for a lemon soda with a few of them, though never with the Brahmins.

Why not with the Brahmins? Sivakami wonders. Is he shunning his own caste or are they shunning him or is it something buried, less specific, which neither he nor the group would admit? Vairum doesn’t feel he needs to admit anything, he simply has never had friends among the Cholapatti Brahmins, and age and distance are not changing this.

Distance is begetting distance, in fact—Vairum is tethered to the village, as they all are, by his land and history. The difference is that he is shod for a great step out into the world. The barbs are beginning to fly, and from this distance, they look a lot like the stones that hailed upon him as a child in his glass house. But now his carapace of contentment is formed, and hail what may, he can retreat within it.

THANGAM HAS RETURNED HOME heavily pregnant with her third child: It’s a boy, a boy! Sivakami is more assured in this birth than she has been in the last two, and her confidence grows as she hands the baby, red and screaming with good health, to his mother. Surely, thinks Sivakami, surely his chubby hands will wipe away the worry lines that have settled on his mother’s face in the years of her marriage. A boy will be active, mischievous. He will clutch and tear Thangam’s dulling mask of anxiety.

Thangam and the baby emerge for the single day of his naming ceremony and then withdraw once more. Two more weeks pass, but Sivakami cannot tell: has the mask rent? On the nineteenth day, Thangam and the baby come out into the sunlight of the courtyard. They bathe, and Thangam’s gold dust silts up the narrow courtyard gutters. She looks calmer than she did on arrival, but the sides of her tongue and the lower rim of her eyelids are tinged a bluish grey. Is she or is she not relieved to have delivered a boy?

The little girls must be relieved to have their mother back, though they might have mixed feelings about the new baby. Saradha, the older one, especially—she had immense difficulty in adjusting to Cholapatti. On arrival, her eyes the size of palm fruits, she had clung to Thangam so vehemently that twice the expectant mother had tripped and fallen, prompting Sivakami to wonder if the child wasn’t jealous and trying to endanger the coming baby. Thangam told her, though, that it was the change of place: they had moved a year earlier, and Saradha had behaved in just the same manner. Saradha is not so much attached to her mother as attached to her routine, to things familiar. It’s true: Saradha violently protested much of what was required of her the first few days, and then insisted, with equal, desperate, vehemence, on doing all the same things every day after that: prayers with her grandmother, whom she conscientiously never touches until after supper, breakfast with Mari, late-morning visit with Rukmini next door, off to Muchami’s village with him, where she takes a nap in his hut, back for tiffin and games with the children who still gather around the veranda whenever Thangam is in town, nursery rhymes on Sivakami’s lap at night, by which time this is permitted. When Thangam emerges from her childbed seclusion, Saradha schedules intervals when she will sit by her mother’s side and coo at her new baby brother. She is not difficult to tend, provided any change, anything new, is introduced only as a modification of her routine.

“Will Saradha be as upset by your return home as she was by her arrival here?” Sivakami asks.

Thangam smiles mildly and shrugs.

Sivakami persists, “When are you going to move house again?”

In eight months.

If Saradha were like her younger sister, Sivakami muses, there would be no need to worry, but the two couldn’t be more different. Where Saradha approaches everything with a seriousness beyond her years or understanding, Visalam seems to see everything as a joke. Every creature, every event makes her laugh, really laugh, good-naturedly ; she is not mocking or spiteful, and she is obedient. Sivakami thinks perhaps she should be worried about her unconventional behaviour, but she has so many other more urgent matters to worry about.

Thangam’s health, for example. She looks weak, too weak even, apparently, to have any interest in her newest baby. With the first baby, Saradha, Thangam showed at least some curiosity, at the child’s tiny fingers and toes. Sivakami saw her once tickling the child’s pretty chin, though with an absent air. She didn’t see what she expected, the adoration that Thangam had shown her little brother all those years ago, that which holds most new parents in helpless thrall.

The little boy, since he was first given the breast, seems to have fed through every waking hour and Thangam has barely looked at him. Thangam’s milk flows from her breast, the roses from her cheeks, the gold from... where? Her skin, her hair? How will she have the energy to relocate three children? And the last is a boy—when they next move, he will, at eight months, need constant attention. The girls also need at least minimal supervision. Goli’s salary and status should permit a couple of servants, but Sivakami has deduced that there are none. Does he fire them, do they quit, does he forget to tell them when they move? How will Thangam cope?

Sivakami chews her lip and selects a bead, tilting her head against the moonbeam illuminating her work. She hears the baby suckling, the breathing of the little girls on their mats in the main hall. Saradha should stay here in Cholapatti, that’s what. And when the next baby comes, Visalam should stay. And with the next, this little boy, whose burgeoning belly has already earned him the nickname Laddu, “sweet ball.” Thangam need only keep her youngest two with her, need only move and tend two children. Sivakami is thirty-four but, having had only two children, feels she has the strength and energy of women half her age.

She proposes the idea to Thangam, who looks reflective and says nothing. Boarding one’s children with a relative is common enough, after all. Gayatri’s first son, whose father was determined to educate him in an English-medium school, had gone at the age of five to live with Gayatri’s second cousin in Madras city. Nor is parental authority sacrosanct: it’s Goli’s parents who have the last word on the children. She will have to wait for their response.

Six weeks after Thangam finishes her seclusion, Goli comes to Cholapatti.

He comes at tiffin time, greets Thangam briefly and pats the new baby on the head. Sivakami had no warning of his arrival and is concerned that she has been caught with nothing fancy enough to serve a son-in-law. Goli looks a little more inclined than usual to wait, though, and in fifteen minutes she has made a semolina pudding with cashews, one of the quickest sweets in the repertoire, and Thangam serves it to her husband along with idlis, steamed rice cakes, and a coconut chutney while the baby naps in his hammock in the corner of the main hall. When she comes back to fetch the mulaghapodi, a powdered chili and lentil condiment, Sivakami tells her, “You should speak to the son-in-law about my suggestion.” Goli will not stay with them—it’s not appropriate for a man to take advantage of his wife’s family to that degree—so Thangam’s only opportunities would be ones like this, and perhaps only this one, since Goli is exceptionally immobile today. He looks tired.

Thangam goes to squat by him while he eats. She says something Sivakami can’t hear. He takes a moment to look up, as though he hadn’t noticed her. “What?” he asks. Thangam speaks again as he frowns at her. “This is your mother’s idea?”

Thangam doesn’t look at him.

Goli eats for a moment without speaking. “I suppose it makes sense, doesn’t it? Chutney?”

Thangam comes to fetch the chutney. The matter is not
technically
concluded, Sivakami thinks, and wonders if the parents will overrule the son. She looks toward the courtyard. Muchami has finished his tiffin and observed this exchange. He looks at her but says nothing, and she knows they will speak later.

Saradha has eaten her tiffin in the back with Muchami as usual. Sivakami had asked if she didn’t want to go eat with her appa, but the little girl shook her head, looking frightened, whether of her father or of the change in routine. Visalam is still too little to feed herself, but as Goli drinks his coffee, she takes him the top she has been playing with. He obligingly spins it a couple of times as she laughs mightily, and then he appears to lose interest, though she continues playing with it, without appearing to notice he is no longer involved.

“I’m off, then,” he says, and leaves.

Sivakami, though gratified by the length and relative normalcy of his visit, is alarmed by the abrupt departure. As Thangam gets her younger daughter’s tiffin, Sivakami asks her, “Did the son-in-law say how many days he would be in town? I have to get your things ready.”

Thangam shrugs.

Later, while Thangam rests, Sivakami raises the topic with Muchami. “I’ve come up with a plan.”

“Are the babies staying here?” he asks.

“One can’t surprise you with anything, huh?” she asks, smiling a little.

“That’s my job.” He shrugs, also smiling.

“Only the eldest. When Thangam has another, we’ll keep Visalam. And so on.”

“It’s a good idea. The son-in-law has been in Cholapatti a couple of days already, trying to find investors for a business idea. I take it that one of the friends he has made here has agreed to front for it.”

Seeing Sivakami’s look of confusion, he clarifies.

“That is, the friend put up some of the initial money and his name will be on it, but he has had trouble getting others to invest, so the son-in-law has come to convince others.”

“Ah. What kind of business?”

“Hm.” He wishes she hadn’t asked. “Ah, a cigar and cigarette manufactory.”

“What?” Sivakami is scandalized. At the very least, she thought Goli was a decent sort. She’s sure he doesn’t dabble in such vices himself, but even pandering to others is hardly upstanding.

“Honestly, Amma, I don’t think it’s going to move,” he hastens to say. “There’s so much involved: you have to convince a landowner to switch over to tobacco, teach the tenant how to grow it. It’s a very particular soil type, I think, that is good for it. It’s not an easy proposition. Of course, if anyone can sell it, it’s the son-in-law,” he continues, as though to himself. Looking at Sivakami again, though, he backtracks. “But I’m sure he won’t.”

What he keeps to himself is that Goli has been spending early evenings in the club and later evenings in places of even lesser repute, spending beyond what Muchami would guess to be the means of a low-level official with three children to support, as well as losing money at cards. Friends who deal in such things have told him this is how big men do business: “You have to spend money to make money, Muchami!” But Goli’s prospects of making money on this seem to Muchami so dicey that he fears the son-in-law is just spending money to spend it. No wonder he didn’t object to the transfer of one of the children to Sivakami’s home: all the more available income for him to invest in his “outside interests.”

Sivakami instructs Mari to wash the babies’ things and Thangam’s saris, then gives them a final rinse herself, so that they are free of lower-caste pollution, throwing them over rods in the courtyard with a pole that she also uses to spread them out to dry. The next day, since Goli didn’t say when Thangam should be ready, Sivakami exhausts herself making snacks for Thangam to take with her: crunchy swirls of savory
thangoril,
fried patties of ghee-soaked
appam,
great for nursing mothers, and in honour of the new baby, a load of
laddus.
She packs them in aluminum tins while Rukmini folds and packs their clothes.

It’s well she does, because the next morning, Goli steps into the house long enough only to call, “Hup, hup! Come! The next train leaves in forty-five minutes! I’m having a word with an associate, then we go.” He vanishes along the Brahmin quarter.

It is only eight o’clock, more than two hours before the mid-morning meal. Mari has not arrived; Muchami is out in the fields. Sivakami is forced to go and ask Murthy to send someone to find Muchami, who must ready the bullock cart. Rukmini has Saradha over next door to play, as is their routine each day at this time.

Thirty minutes later, the cart is packed and Thangam settled in the back with Visalam and Laddu, but Goli has not returned. Fifteen minutes pass; the train will have departed. Thangam is unloaded, faint from the heat of the street. She trails her gold dust back into the house. It is the hottest season—no one with a choice ventures out from eight to four, when the day bubbles around 100 degrees. It should be forbidden to small children and women recovering from childbirth, Sivakami thinks.

She had not tried to explain to Saradha what was going to happen, though she had a feeling Thangam wouldn’t either, unless Sivakami told her to. Sivakami knew the child would be deeply alarmed but also didn’t want to prepare her too far in advance, not knowing when Goli had in mind for them to go. The little girl, seeing her mother loaded into the cart, had panicked and started screaming without moving, not wanting to get into the cart but not wanting to let her mother go. Sivakami had hesitated to pick up the child: she would merely need another bath, but she had been madi for so long that it was no longer her first response. Before she could, though, Muchami ran and scooped up the little girl, pressing her face to his shoulder, shushing and rocking her until she calmed down. He has carried her to his home village every day since her arrival—she is still too small to be contaminated by contact with the lower castes, though she is made to change her clothes in the courtyard before re-entering the house—and she is as close to him as to Sivakami now.