The Toss of a Lemon (45 page)

Janaki follows but doesn’t understand. “How can we do the puja before the priest comes and everyone is ready, Amma?”

“No, kanna.” Sivakami moves briskly into the hall. “Your puja, for school.”

Vairum is already before the gods, doing his regular morning prostrations and prayers, clothes and hair still wet from his bath.

Sivakami takes the brass plate on which Janaki’s small pile awaits, and dots a little vermilion powder on each item. Janaki shifts foot to foot, chewing on her lip, looking anxiously at the door where Sita has emerged from her bath. “Hurry up, Sita, my puja is starting.”

Sita slows down to a insolent saunter. “So?”

A look from Sivakami speeds her along.

Sivakami is lighting camphor and offering Janaki’s things along with flowers, sugar rock-candy, a coconut and a piece of turmeric. She prays to goddess Saraswati that Janaki will work hard, appreciate this great privilege and succeed. When they think the goddess has had enough time to grant them the blessing, the plate is set down and Janaki prostrates for the gods, her grandmother and uncle, and Sita, because she’s older than Janaki and happens to be present. From the gods, Janaki believes she receives benevolent approval. From her grandmother, she receives solid encouragement. Her uncle looks uninterested and skeptical but tells her to make the best of this and sounds like he expects to be obeyed. Sita lets Janaki get close before she whispers, “You’ll be a disaster.” She beams at her little sister, saccharine and malign.

Then Vani arrives to do her morning prayers, after which she sits and begins playing.

Laddu comes and sits to one side, morning-befuddled, but clean and dressed for a special occasion, and everyone else is clearly waiting for something more. Janaki sees Muchami in the garden and goes to the door. “My puja is over,” she tells him. “What is everyone waiting for?”

She spoke her question a little too loud. Everyone turns a puzzled look on her, except Sita, who hoots and cackles, “She thought everyone was dressing up because they were so excited that the little dimwit’s off to learn some learning!”

“Sita, stop that.” Sivakami turns toward the little girl. “We’re doing a puja for the Ramar, today, Kanna. Vairum Mama and Vani Mami are asking to be blessed with children. You forgot?”

Had Janaki known, she surely would not have forgotten. She has participated in many rituals already to this end and was especially enthusiastic about the one where Vani poured milk down snake holes.

A priest arrives as Janaki sulks in the garden door. The priest begins to set up the fire. He needs to start the puja within this hour and a quarter: one of the auspicious times that checkerboard the day. Sivakami bustles back and forth from the kitchen with things the priest needs as Vani plays on, more intensely and virtuosically than usual, though all Janaki can tell for sure is that it seems louder.

The priest does the preliminary incantations. Vairum comes and sits where he is directed to by the priest. Sita is sitting beside Laddu, looking disgusted. She whispers something to him and he shrinks like he’s been jabbed with a hot poker. Vani still plays. Janaki decides to go change into her uniform, but when she rises, Sivakami shakes her head. The priest looks at Sivakami and at Vairum; he’s done all he can do without Vani’s participation. They look back at him as though they don’t understand what he wants.

The priest turns to Vani but senses something about her that makes him unwilling to address her directly. So he casts another, more obviously plaintive glance at Vairum, who sighs and raises his eyebrows back. The priest points at the hourglass. They don’t have much time to get on with it. All the household watches with eyes narrowed as Vairum approaches the woman who should regard him as her lord.

As he crouches beside her, she gives no indication that she is aware of him. Finally, in a natural pause in the music, he says tentatively,
“Ma?”

She launches passionately into the next movement of the improvisation, her left hand, above one gourd, strumming and plucking the melody, right hand, at the frets above the other gourd, stroking out the accompanying drone. Sita and Laddu break into vicious chuckles and don’t stop despite Vairum’s withering stare. Vairum flushes. He rises to standing, like a hawk poised in the air before a dive. Janaki, from her vantage point, sees his lips seal into a tiny knot.

Fwoosh
—he stoops and catches Vani’s left wrist, arresting the melody.

Without breaking the drone sound, Vani’s right hand forms a fist and knocks him in the forehead. He falls, stunned, onto his bottom as he releases her wrist. She resumes her virtuosic swells. Now every eye in the room is open very wide, except Vairum’s, which are screwed shut. He keeps them that way as he rises and stumbles through Janaki’s doorway into the garden. She tucks her legs in so as not to trip him.

Only Janaki can see him as he leans his desecrated forehead against a young papaya tree. He stays that way for a very long time, while the notes climax and come to rest. Vani places her hands on her knees and takes one breath, staring at her instrument. Upon exhaling, she raises her head and her eyes come into focus. She gets up and seats herself in place for the puja. The priest awakens in a fluster from his own reverie, finds his place in the sloka book and begins to chant.

Vairum detaches himself from the lacy, leafy papaya tree and returns to the doorway. The sun is behind him and Janaki cannot see his face. He turns to take his place beside his wife. On his forehead is the deeply imprinted double X of the papaya trunk’s bark-a wavy diamond with a half reflection on each side. The hourglass runs out as they complete the puja for a child. The papaya skin diamond melts from his forehead, as his diamond-dark eyes, too, melted briefly into something soft and hurt.

As the auspicious time dribbles to an end, Janaki jumps up and runs off to change into her uniform before her grandmother can object.

Her white shirt and blue skirt are starched as stiff, it seems, as her books. The buttons of the shirt are at the back, so she has to ask Sita for help doing them up. Sita deliberately buttons her wrong; Sivakami notices and makes her do it again, and then squats in the kitchen with a brass pot of yogourt rice. The children seat themselves in a semicircle around her and she feeds them their breakfast, dropping a mouthful of the mixture into each of their palms in turn as they eat.

When they finish, they run to the well to wash their hands, rinse their mouths and gather their things. Muchami secures Janaki’s books in their strap as she picks up her slate, writing stick and ink, and they run for the door.

He lifts her onto the cart. “Janaki-baby, go to the centre, away from the edge.”

He points and then stands, twisting his shoulder towel around a finger as Janaki crawls to the centre, moving her things in two trips. As the cart lurches around the corner, she seats herself in a puff of relief, and then looks up to see Muchami watching her from the veranda. She suddenly realizes he needs to do all his regular things today: go to his home, take a nap—how is he going to do all that without her? She had gotten so excited about going to school that she hadn’t considered the fact that she wouldn’t be at home.

She tries to stand but stumbles on a couple of other children. The last sight she has of her home is Muchami gesturing impatiently and yelling, “Sit! Sit!”

Muchami enters the garden (he had run through the house to help Janaki but, as a matter of course, doesn’t walk through the main hall), walks through the cowshed and into the courtyard.

“I suppose I’ll get the marketing done, Amma,” he calls to Sivakami. “Anything particular I should look for?”

“No. Whatever’s good.” She doesn’t look up from preparing the mid-morning meal. He doesn’t go, however, but continues standing in the courtyard, half out of sight, beyond the kitchen door. Sivakami stands to dump out the water in which she has been rinsing okra, and sees him. “I said, whatever’s good.”

He looks at the ground. He doesn’t understand how Sivakami could not feel as he does, bereft, though the course of her day is relatively unaltered by Janaki’s departure.

“You know, Mari and I have talked, sometimes, about adopting a child,” he tells her.

She slices the okra against the blade, tossing it into a pan. “I think that’s a good idea. No one should be without a child.”

“I think, maybe a little girl.”

“A girl? Why would you do that?” She doesn’t think she has ever heard of anyone adopting a girl. Childless Brahmins generally adopt some poor relative’s son, so that they themselves will have a son to perform their death rites. Muchami’s community’s customs are unknown to her, though. She suspects they may not have annual death rites; they barely even observe time the same way as Brahmins.

“You’re right,” he says hastily, unwinding his shoulder towel yet again from his sweaty palm. “I don’t know. I’ll go to market now.”

Sivakami shrugs. She has no idea what’s on his mind, but expects either he will tell her, or she will guess, in good time.

At the entrance to the schoolyard, Sita jumps off the cart and walks toward the school without looking back. Janaki finally figures out a way to pile everything on her slate and balance it as she walks, but she has to stop every few steps to look up and check where Sita is going.

They enter the school, a long mud building with six classrooms, their doors opening directly onto the yard. At one end are three offices, occupied by the headmistress and some lesser functionaries. Their doors open onto a hallway that traverses the width of the school, and opens onto the schoolyard at either end. There are only sixty girls in the school, so the first-, second- and third-standard students are together. Sita and Janaki will be in the same class.

“Miss, this is Janaki, Miss, my sister,” Sita mumbles to the teacher for form’s sake as she crosses to deposit her tiffin box in the coolest corner of the room.

It’s then that Janaki notices she is without her own lunch. Did she leave it in the cart? But no, it took her two trips to move her things, one for books and pen, a second for slate and ink. It must still be in the kitchen, where her grandmother leaves Laddu’s and Sita’s lunches after packing them. But she cannot take any more time to think about it. Sita has already taken her seat on the floor among the other third-standard girls. Janaki pivots from one side to another on her heels, trying not to upset her little stack of supplies, unsure as to where she should go. The teacher, Miss Mathanghi, points her toward the opposite side of the room, where eleven girls of roughly Janaki’s size and level of uncertainty are sitting. They all started school this month; three are starting today.

Miss Mathanghi, an ancient and dour twenty-five, waits for the shuffling and gossip to peak. The last girls are just entering as she launches into the morning’s prayer, some twelve couplets from the Bhagavad-Gita, which she bellows line by line, and which the girls yell back. She does this once through with the entire classroom in some semblance of chorus. She then sings out each line a second time, looking at the ceiling or out the window. At the end of the line, she points to a student, who must repeat it alone. Sita is among the first; she gets perhaps half of her line right. That is typical for her, but today she has an additional distraction: she is smiling a calculating smile at her sister, implying that Janaki will be chosen and that she should be scared.

Janaki is scared. One of her standard-mates is selected, a little girl like her, who has only begun school that day. She just gapes at the teacher, who stares back a second before rolling her eyes and pointing to a second-standard. Janaki feels herself petrifying and turning red; perhaps, she thinks, perhaps she can blend into the brick floor. Perhaps the teacher will see only an empty space, an empty uniform starched stiff enough to stand alone.

But there is the pointer, aimed at Janaki.

And Janaki responds, repeating the entire line perfectly. Or so it sounds to her, but then it always does. But yes, it’s true: the teacher is nodding, surprised, approving. She sings out the next line and the next, the final line of the prayer. She indicates Janaki for both of them. Janaki repeats them. She looks cautiously at Sita, expecting her sister to be shaking in triumphant hilarity while Janaki makes a fool of herself, but Sita is gaping at her jealously and looks away when Janaki turns to her.

The first class of the day for the youngest girls is arithmetic; the first exercise is writing the numerals one through ten. The teacher props a slate near the front of the classroom and writes, “1, 2, 3.” “Those of you who can, copy this. Those of you who can‘t, well, then we will know you can’t!”

Janaki thinks she can do this. The first figure on the board looks like a walking stick, the next an ear, with a dangling earring blowing out in the wind, the last like a bird, tipped sideways to round a corner in flight. She thinks the teacher has been too hasty in making the drawings and does her best to make each figure more realistic and accurate.

If only she could stop the tears that keep blurring the image in front of her, the job would be much simpler. She can’t seem to stop herself from thinking about the calves and cows, who must be feeling lost without her there to instruct and reassure them. And Vani—will she even bother to change her story when no one at all is listening? Worst of all, Muchami is walking home alone. He’ll be leaving any time now, his head heavy with questions he can ask no one. Three tears plink onto her new slate and she wipes them off with her skirt quickly before anyone can see. But when she blinks, swallows and blinks again, the design she worked so hard to produce is also gone, and she has a smear of chalk on her navy blue skirt.

Meanwhile the teacher has given a reading assignment to the second-standards. The third-standard girls have been asked to write out multiplication tables.

“I’m so looking forward to reading Sita’s times table—three days ago she wrote all the figures so small no one but she could make them out. I’m sure they were all absolutely correct,” Miss Mathanghi says in a tone implying the opposite. Her face is grim as concrete.