The Toss of a Lemon (49 page)

The fourth-standard girls are still at work on nouns, chanting them in singular, dual, plural, until, finally, the words become sounds without meaning. With the sixth-standards, Kesavan has taken it upon himself to introduce them to some classics of Hindu theatre, starting with Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam. The well-loved story of a hermit’s daughter, married in a secret ceremony to a king who later fails to recognize her owing to a curse, it is a challenge to the children, the vocabulary being sophisticated for the ten ten-year-olds, and the romantic intrigues even more so for the two eight-year-olds. Bharati alone seems alarmingly equal to both.

Rattling home in the bullock cart bound for the Brahmin quarter, Janaki reviews the Shakuntalam story episodes of that day, knowing they will form the better part of that afternoon’s tutorial. She had read the part of the jester, a Brahmin. She would have loved to play the star role, Shakuntala, but that had gone to Bharati, and Janaki had to admit she deserved it.

Janaki tries to remember her longest speech, in which the jester complains about his forest sojourn in the king’s company: “... drinking water from tepid streams fouled with dead leaves, eating badly cooked meat at odd hours...” Their teacher had shocked the class by saying this line showed that Brahmins likely once ate meat. One girl, taunted with this after school, had burst into tears and said it was a lie. Janaki thought she might be right. She has heard Sivakami and Muchami describe Kesavan pejoratively as a “progressive,” and so is skeptical of anything he says about caste.

In front of her—that is, behind the cart—a creature with strong legs and puny waving arms gallops out of the banana groves to the left. Janaki flushes as the creature giddily hurtles into the groves to the right. She sighs hard, once, through her nose.

A moment later, Muchami and Kamalam, in piggyback combo, bounce out of the groves again and gallop and weave up the road. Kamalam waves in a manner Janaki thinks is ridiculous, as she plans to inform her sister as soon as they arrive home. For now she is limited to a dignified, reproving glare. Muchami and Kamalam both seem too exhilarated to notice Janaki’s expression, though the jolt and shudder of the cart would make focusing on Janaki difficult even for the soberest of persons. Janaki clenches her teeth, trying at minimum to keep her cheeks from infantile jiggling, but the cart hits an anthill and all its contents are flung about. By the time Janaki collects herself, Muchami and Kamalam have turned up the path behind the Brahmin-quarter houses.

She wonders if Muchami asked Kamalam any questions today, as he used to do with her, which thought slows her to a stop in the vestibule. Her chest feels tight, her face hot. She is close to tears, but Sita and Laddu shove her from behind and the three of them stumble into the main hall, where loud laughter clusters and breaks around them: their second sister, Visalam, has arrived—she is also expecting—escorted by an entourage of her relentlessly gay in-laws, all now momentarily incapacitated by the schoolchildren’s brief physical comedy.

Already, Kamalam is seated next to Visalam and is laughing. The rest of the party is looking at the door, but Kamalam stares at Visalam and her husband, and bursts into delighted gales whenever they do. Sivakami is beckoning the schoolchildren from the kitchen, but Janaki’s eyes are trained upon the treacherous Kamalam, who was to have been Janaki’s shadow, her admirer, her imitator, and instead is insinuating herself into all those places that are rightfully Janaki’s own. Sivakami calls Janaki by name but the child smoulders to her doorway niche with the intention of wasting away.

Ten minutes later, no one seems to have noticed her wasting. She keeps her face turned resolutely to the garden until she sees Muchami approaching from the cowshed, grinning broadly and toting his slate. Then she turns toward the hall to snub him.

Muchami sits on the ground behind her and asks, “Janaki-baby, where is your slate?” Normally, Janaki starts writing out the initial stanzas of the class in advance of Kesavan’s arrival, and Muchami copies from her. When Kesavan arrives, they are often already mid-chant. They rub out and start over with the class, but the advance exercises make them feel unified and athletic.

“By the door,” Janaki replies as though she can’t imagine why he’s asking.

If Muchami notices her tone, he doesn’t let on.

“Young Kesavan is arriving, listen.” He points into the hall with his chin.

Bursts of laughter issue from the hall. Kesavan nervously reciprocates. From the corner of her eye, Janaki watches the in-laws shift and roll apart with the motion of a flotilla.

“Tell Kamalam to fetch it for you,” Muchami suggests.

Janaki straightens.

“Kamalam!” she essays. “My slate.” She points to it.

Kamalam scuttles to the door in a single motion, more eagerness than grace. Delivering the slate, she awaits further instructions. Muchami indicates to Kamalam that she can sit. She does, cross-legged, not leaning against anything, but, like Muchami, facing Janaki expectantly.

“Kamalam-baby, you listen carefully to Janaki,” Muchami says. “This is Sanskrit and it’s not easy.”

Janaki reminds herself that, even if she’s less inclined to express it, her scorn for their earlier foolishness has in no way relaxed. For now, it’s a special flavouring—essence of contempt—in the sweet sense of superiority flowing from beneath her tongue.

She clears her throat and calls to mind the cadence of the day’s first syllables, but before she can mouth them, the hall is blustered once more by gales of laughter. Laddu’s tutoring fellows are sidling in. They get laughed at a lot, however, and so neither hang back nor show alarm. One is tall, one fat, one handsome, but people tend to think they look alike because they share the tentative and hopeful bewilderment of the bad student who will never improve.

Janaki looks to young Kesavan, expecting him to be irritated or self-conscious at being stuck in this tittering tableau, but he has spied an opportunity. As Laddu and his three fellows sink to the floor, Kesavan rises and addresses the mini-multitude.

“I am hoping the majority of you are comfortable with Sanskrit pronunciation,” he smiles eagerly and only wavers a little at the shouts of laughter he receives in response. It’s not clear whether these are self-mockery or affirmation, so he has no choice but to plunge on. “Since you all are here, I hope you will permit me to take advantage and have you recite, along with the children, some scenes from Shakuntalam.” Here he pauses to receive the hoped-for hoots. “I can tell you agree it is a splendid chance to help the young people of this house better appreciate this beloved play.”

He casts everyone in the room in a role. Janaki is awarded the role of Shakuntala. Sita and Visalam are her girl chums, Visalam’s husband the king, Laddu the jester, Muchami plays a charioteer and several minor hermits. Kesavan then begins to conduct them as though they are an orchestra. He sings out lines, and indicates individuals and clusters to echo him like woodwind or string sections coming in at the baton’s behest. This is the largest audience Janaki has ever had, and she brings all her skills of diction and dramatics to the part. She doesn’t look at Kamalam for the duration of the lesson but feels her sister’s gaze. Kamalam has found an ambition: to play second fiddle to Janaki’s first.

But if Janaki is first, what is Sita? Visalam is married and therefore Sita should be highest ranked in the household now. Was she hoping for the part Janaki had been given? Janaki, casting her eyes across the room, sees Sita’s eyes burning like a cat’s in a darkened corner.

By end of the second act, voices are flagging. Kesavan winds up the day’s session; the crowd wants to know where the story goes next, so he knows he’ll have his cast back the next day. Many of the younger relatives will stay a couple of days in Cholapatti and are likely to be around at tiffin times. He gives them a brief disquisition on the portion they’ve read and asks if anyone has questions. Janaki asks whether there is a written assignment, but Sivakami interrupts to say that young Kesavan has stayed much longer than his contracted period and should hurry home lest complete darkness overtake him on the road.

The lesson over, Janaki goes up the winding staircase to the roof to listen to Vani play. Kamalam creeps along behind her. Vani is playing “Jaggadodharana” again, just commencing a charanam, the improvisational segments that make up the last parts of a song in performance. The girls squat by the balustrade, under the awning’s shade. This is one of the strangest charanams Janaki has ever heard Vani play, though Janaki suspects that more than her still elementary musical education prevents her from understanding Vani’s playing. She descends the stairs to go out back of the house. Bharati comes there daily to sit beneath the old mango tree and listen to Vani play. Kamalam follows her sister.

Janaki exits from the cowshed to the courtyard and out the back of the house, and looks left to the mango tree roots. Bharati is not there. Janaki takes two steps out and squats to scan the forest’s lower reaches. Some bird whistles a two-note signal. Where is Bharati? She can’t have left yet. The bird signals again, from the same place, close to the mango tree, or in its branches.

“Hsst,” Janaki hears. “Janaki.”

Janaki trips over a set of margosa roots tangled across the path. Bharati’s hennaed feet are waving from a low branch of the mango tree. One of her silver anklets keeps catching on the red-orange border of her chartreuse paavaadai—her favourite colours, distinctive anywhere except in a mango tree, where they serve as camouflage.

“Was that you whistling?” Janaki peers up at her.

“Who did you think it was?” Bharati grins.

“Why are you up in the tree?” Janaki asks, sounding grouchier than she intends.

“I thought I would be able to make the song out better,” Bharati explains.

“Can you?” Janaki moves to the tree and looks up.

“No. Come up anyway. Is that your sister?”

“Yes, Kamalam.” Janaki points at the littler girl, who hangs back, nearer the house. “How do I get up there?”

“Jump and grab that branch there and swing your foot up. Come.” Bharati holds out a hand as though to help.

Janaki jumps for the branch and swings. She kicks her legs, which makes her swing harder, pedals her feet against the trunk, falls.

“Try again,” Bharati suggests.

“Come down if you can’t hear the song any better anyway.” Janaki sits, leaning against the trunk, and beckons her sister impatiently to join her.

A minute’s rustling later, Bharati drops from the tree in a pretty heap, thumping against the ground with a sound akin to mangoes falling on windy days, the promise of sweetness, even sweeter if bruised.

“I have a sister around your age,” Bharati says to Kamalam, who sits, knees to chest, on Janaki’s other side. “Maybe she’ll be in your class at school.”

“Isn’t Vani Mami’s playing so strange today?” Janaki shifts a little so Bharati’s view of Kamalam is obstructed.

Bharati shrugs. “No one plays like her, but other people have kids.”

Janaki doesn’t know what Bharati means but is not going to admit that in front of Kamalam.

That night Thangam goes into labour.

The next afternoon, Janaki is listening to Vani play, again “Jaggadhodarana,” with the strange improvisation, which has grown even wilder and more alien. And when the rips and hies of a newborn’s cry rise from the room below the stairs to join the notes bounding across the rooftop, Janaki hears: Vani’s version sobs. The song somehow remains intact—perhaps because the improvisation cycles back to the original raga—but a keening invades it, as if the song were a baby blanket impaled on a sword.

Abruptly, Vani ceases playing, takes up her instrument and carries it down the stairs to the chamber she and Vairum inhabit on the second story. Janaki and Kamalam edge along the balustrade. Janaki happens to glance east over the rail, into the witch’s yard next door, where the slapping of laundry against laundry stone had been providing percussive accompaniment to Vani’s music. Dharnakarna, the witch next door, is washing the clothes herself. It often happens that her servants quit. In the silence which seems extra silent now, the witch’s sister-in-law’s incessant obscene monologue crescendoes and recedes again within the witch’s kitchen. Dharnakarna doesn’t pause.

Janaki, her hand on Kamalam’s shoulder, arrives at the bottom of the stairs as Vairum blows in from his business, a cold front in a warm climate. The door to the birthing room is closed. He goes to the pantry entrance and sees that the kitchen is empty.

“Amma?” He calls out. “Amma!”

Sivakami answers from within the birthing room. “A boy! Finally, another boy.”

Vairum nods, walks toward the stairway, and pauses outside the birthing room.

“Congratulations, Thangam Akka!” Vairum calls out. “A second son, at last. Now you truly need worry about nothing. I could even kill your first son and you would still have another. Nice work. Your mind must now be so at ease.”

Laddu, who had just emerged from the pantry with two bananas in each hand and his mouth stretched to encompass a generously proportioned sphere of thaingai maavu, retreats again. Janaki and Kamalam look at him, terrified, but Vairum looks back a little too late to see his nephew, then turns to mount the stairs. Kamalam holds on to the back of Janaki’s shirt as they shuffle through the doorway and along the garden wall. Kamalam is crying, and Janaki looks at her sternly.

“Kamalam, Vairum Mama’s not going to do anything,” Janaki tells her little sister as they arrive at the cowshed, where Muchami is milking. “Muchami, Vairum Mama isn’t going to hurt Laddu Anna, is he?”

“No, no, no.” Muchami puts a hand on Kamalam’s head. “Vairum was just... he was just talking. Aren’t you glad to have a little brother?”

Kamalam nods, though she is still crying. Janaki doesn’t reply, ashamed of her anger at the uncle who shelters them. Muchami seats Kamalam where she can watch the milking, but Janaki goes out back through the courtyard door. Bharati drops out of the tree beside her.