The Toss of a Lemon (46 page)

Sita, already seeing red due to Janaki’s recent triumph, bends to her work with a grimness bordering on the teacher’s own. It’s not the only way she resembles the teacher. Sita has a talent for hurting people, but she has learned a lot in Miss Mathanghi’s classroom.

Miss Mathanghi is making her way back to the first-standard girls. She has a small waist and low hips behind which clings a flat bottom. Her skin is greyish and her shoulders so rounded that her trunklike arms give the impression of emerging more from the front than from the sides of her torso. She has taught these classes for eight years, more than long enough to know that, in this tender phase, she need do little more than look at the first-standards to set them aquiver with fear and self-consciousness. Janaki, though, is a harder nut. She is not, as most of her classmates are, fixed desperately on the teacher, searching her in vain for signs of approval or affection. She is weeping, which is common, but, despite the tears, seems fully absorbed in the scene she is elaborating on her slate.

Janaki’s slate shows a small flock of 3’s, headed by a fantastic bird of prey. She is sitting back from the slate so that her tears drop onto her skirt and don’t interfere.

Miss Mathangi chooses her approach instinctively. “You don’t turn the world, Janaki.”

The little girl sits up, as though the currents running between her brain and spinal cord have suddenly increased in voltage.

“Either you do as you please,” the teacher continues deliberately, “which is to say, the wrong thing, or you do what I have instructed you to do, that is, the same thing as every other girl in this classroom.”

It hadn’t occurred to Janaki to look at what the other girls were doing. Now she looks around. Most of the children have done a passable job. Janaki looks at the brief and unattractive marks on their slates, and the detailed, dramatic tableau on her own. She’s confused. She automatically looks to her sister. She knows, though she doesn’t realize it until she’s already turned her head, that she will see the usual cruel gloat. Even that, however, is reassuringly familiar at the moment.

But then a far more reassuring figure appears. Could it be? Muchami is silhouetted in the doorway. He stands and doesn’t say anything, just moves a little, side to side, to draw attention.

All the girls crane to see him, tipping forward onto the knees of their crossed legs, though not rising. Miss Mathanghi glances at him and asks, “What?”

He holds out his right hand, a string tied into a loop hooked across his palm. At the other end of the string dangles Janaki’s shiny new tiffin box.

“It’s Janaki’s lunch,” he explains gruffly and looks furtively into the classroom, searching for her face.

Janaki is frozen, fixed on him, but her eyes dart to her teacher and back.

“Mmh!” Miss Mathanghi grunts and jerks her head toward the door to indicate Janaki should go take her lunch.

Janaki slowly rises and goes to the door, uncertain of how she should take her lunch from him. Why is he carrying it like that? She holds her left hand out as if to take the string, but he holds the tiffin box up and frowns to indicate she’d better take hold of it. She carries the box to the lunch corner as Sita starts to laugh, and soon the whole classroom is in gales, hysterical from the tension of the classroom.

When Janaki sets the tiffin box down, Sita yells, “Touch the water, touch the water!”

There is a jug of water in the corner by the tiffin boxes, and Janaki tips it with her left hand so that she moistens the fingers of her right, a ceremonial washing of the hand polluted by contact with cooked rice. As she does so, she looks over to Muchami.

Who is not there.

She drops the neck of the jug but catches it by the lip before it falls too far. The girls who see this gasp and then start laughing again as Janaki runs out the door and after Muchami. She throws her arms around his legs and clasps her face to his hip, clinging with the strength of immature fruit to the stem. Muchami pries her off: fruit drops away when it’s ready, but unripe fruit can also be plucked and ripen on its own.

“Oh, Janaki-baby.” He stoops toward her. “Don’t you love school? What did you learn today?”

Janaki doesn’t answer. Her small body strains toward him so that the second his elbows relax, she sticks herself again to his leg.

“Have you had enough for today already?” He knows he probably shouldn’t even be asking, but he, too, had been wondering how he would get through his day without her. “Okay, just today. You can come with me.”

She lifts her arms to him and he picks her up and starts to walk, her arms around his neck, her face in his shoulder. He can feel her calming, or is that him?

Her face in his neck, she asks, “Muchami, why did you carry my food with the string—because of cooked-rice pollution?”

“Um, no, Janaki-baby,” he replies, feeling an unaccustomed sting of humiliation. “Because you are Brahmin and I cannot touch your food.”

Vairum had left already to look after business in Thiruchi when they noticed the forgotten tiffin box in the corner, and they were about to send for one of the layabout sons of one of the Brahmin quarter’s poorer families, but then Mari had proposed that, just as she used a stick to move the family’s clean laundry and detangle the girls’ hair, Muchami should be able to carry the food if there was some instrument intervening. Sivakami produced the twine.

Janaki raises her head. “How come you can carry me like this but not my food?”

“Because you can take a bath or change your clothes, but your food can’t? Or maybe because you would be uncomfortable if I tied you up with string?” he suggests.

“Yes,” Janaki smiles. “I’m too big for you to carry me that way.”

“That must be it,” he smiles back.

They return to the house. It’s still early; Muchami has not yet had his morning meal. Even before reaching the little temple halfway along the road into the Brahmin quarter, they can hear Vani’s music. She had resumed right after the puja. Does this mean the day has continued in Janaki’s absence? Or is it now picking up where she left off? She would have believed the latter, were it not for the seed of doubt Miss Mathanghi had so accurately sown.

Janaki and Muchami enter through the courtyard door. As he washes his hands and feet, Janaki changes her clothes as her grandmother instructed her to do whenever she returns from her outings with Muchami. If she were older, she would have to bathe.

When she emerges from the bathroom, Mari, serving Muchami his meal, yells, “Ayoh! Janaki?”

Janaki runs through the kitchen, past her grandmother, into the main hall and drops herself into her doorway niche. She is sore all over. The music surrounds her and she starts to relax.

Vani raises her left hand and beckons in the child’s direction. Janaki looks behind her to her right, into the garden, to her left, into the back of the hall, but she is the only one around. Vani looks directly at Janaki, something she’s never done, her pale face solemn, her eyes canny and expectant. She beckons once more.

Janaki leaves her niche and seats herself, facing Vani and slightly to her right. Vani strokes the drone strings, upward, with her right pinky, leaving the melody for a moment. As she does, she taps the front of her left hand on her lap. Then she taps the back, then the front again, and as she does, strokes the drone. Then again the front of the hand, with a drone stroke, and she counts off, pinky, ring, middle finger. She repeats: front of hand, back, front, back, front, pinky, ring, middle, with the drone struck each time she taps with the front of her hand, and Janaki understands: this is how you count off the rhythm.

As Vani resumes playing, continuing to stroke the drone with her pinky on the taalam’s downbeat, playing the melody with her ring and middle fingers and working the frets with her left hand, Janaki taps out the taalam.

“Adhi Taalam,” Vani names it for her with a smile, and Janaki is elated because she hears it and doesn’t have to pretend any more.

As she listens to the song, though, which has grown sleepy and tense, like the lull before an episode in a long-running quarrel, Janaki’s teacher’s words return to her. She blushes and happens to look to her right, where she sees Vairum standing on the spiral stairs leading down from his and Vani’s quarters. He is watching Janaki with a look she will never forget, though she won’t understand it for years: the remnants of that morning’s humiliation, scattered against years of disappointment.

Janaki circles with her hands the space her aunt and the veena inhabit and cracks her baby knuckles against her own temples—a customary gesture of affection. Vairum charges.

“All you children, all of you think you own this place, don’t you? This is your inheritance from your father—the belief that you have the right to a good life without working for it! How long did you last, a half-hour? The school uniform is a joke to you? This is not your veena! This is not your place! You do not decide, do you hear?”

Vairum advances six steps toward her with his speech and Janaki has to flee. She scoots back an equal distance on her bottom, then stumbles to her feet and backs away, around the veena and her aunt, both of whom continue as before. As her uncle reaches the spot where Janaki herself had been sitting, Janaki reaches the garden door. As Sivakami yells, “Stop! Stop, my son!” Janaki runs out into the green and embraces from behind the young papaya whose succour Vairum had taken earlier.

The earth in the pockets between the tree’s roots tempts her. With one hand still fast round the tree, Janaki flips into her mouth a lump of dirt the size of the thaingai maavu balls the children have for their after-school snack. The soil is crunchy and damply acrid, and contains a couple of jasmine petals. Its dark comfort spreads in her mouth. She sighs and leans her forehead on the tree, both arms clasped round it, its parasol of leaves nodding above. Despite having her forehead pressed to the tree, Janaki can see her grandmother approaching from the main hall and Muchami from the cowshed.

Sivakami says from the door, “Tch-tch, Janaki-baby. Vairum Mama didn’t mean what he said. He knows you are a good girl, a smart girl. But why are you home from school now? You were so excited to go.”

But Muchami reaches her, turns her small shoulders from the tree and puts his arms around her. Janaki knows Vairum meant every word of what he said and now she has learned something else on her first day of school: to be afraid of her uncle.

She starts to cry on Muchami’s shoulder and a dribble of black drool escapes the downpulled corner of her mouth and falls onto his bicep. He wipes it with his shoulder towel and frowns at its colour. “Ah, Janaki-baby,” he sighs. “How many times do you have to be told?”

Mari, who had joined them by now, choruses, “Ayoh! Dirty girl! So much good food you get in this house! Don’t eat dirt! Don’t, don’t eat dirt!”

Janaki’s sobs, which had been pulling at her small form with increasing intensity, cease with a great inward yank, as though a line around her has been pulled taut. She fixes on Mari a look of weariness. Mari, who means well, clamps shut her lips. Janaki whips around and vomits on the roots of the young papaya.

Muchami takes her by the hand and leads her to the courtyard, where he washes her face and tells her to rinse her mouth. Vani finishes playing in the meantime, and Muchami sends Janaki back inside to listen to the day’s story while he has his meal. This week, Vani has been telling the story of a mysterious reliquary that seemed always to appear during times of crisis in the family, and disappear when the crisis had passed. A box in the shape of a parrot, encrusted with a filigree of unidentifiable metals, it contained a rosewood bowl as big as half a hen’s egg, still bearing faint traces of some pearly unguent; two coins, the smaller with a stamp of fruits and the other of two figures entwined in erotic counterpoise; and a wooden statuette that offended everyone who saw it: a dog with vermilion stains that indicated it was an object of worship. No one could hold on to the box, and no one could agree on whether it was bringing or banishing the family’s episodes of ill fortune.

Janaki checks the vestibule and sees that Vairum’s shoes are gone: he’s out on rounds or wherever he goes. She sits across from Vani and sinks into the story as into a down-filled comforter, wondering where it will go today. In the last four tellings, the story has turned on Vani’s uncle noticing the reliquary, in a time when he had been asking many pointed questions and receiving no answers. His suspicions of some misfortune afoot had been confirmed by the parrot box’s appearance. Janaki wonders if the story will change today and hopes not. She’s in the mood for continuity.

Maybe Vani senses this, because the story stays the same, with only the smallest additions or subtractions of detail. When the story is done, Janaki looks over to see if Muchami is ready and waiting. He is, and the two of them set off for his home. En route, Janaki asks the questions she had prepared. Muchami has a couple of his own. They are quieter than usual. At Muchami’s house, Janaki falls promptly asleep and remains so for the entire afternoon. When she awakens, it is to find herself in Muchami’s arms, and half of the homeward journey completed.

Back at home, Laddu and Sita have already arrived. Janaki tenses for a barrage of Sita’s barbs, but Sivakami must have spoken to her because Sita says nothing.

An hour later, she and Muchami sit in their usual spot for the Sanskrit tutorial. Janaki sings out her responses with confidence and without expression, as though already taking for granted what the teacher notes with a congratulatory smile: she has had a breakthrough.

In a pause, while young Kesavan drills the other pupils in a phrase Janaki had gotten right the first time, Muchami leans over. “You are the smartest and the best, Janaki-baby.” She smiles, embarrassed, and butts her forehead into his shoulder.

The next morning, Janaki rises, as usual, well ahead of the other children, and commences her morning routine. When Sita and Laddu sit to do their homework, she sits with them, bent over the slate Sita brought home for her the day before.