The Toss of a Lemon (50 page)

“Did I hear a baby cry?” she inquires.

“Yeah. A boy.” Janaki scrapes up a handful of dirt, dry and pebbly.

“A boy, huh?” Bharati crosses her wrists elegantly over one knee. “Your amma must be happy.”

Janaki shrugs—she has never thought of her mother as happy.

“My mother is never happy when she has a boy baby,” Bharati says, tearing a long blade of grass into shreds. “And they don’t live, except for my one brother.” She drifts into silence, then sighs a quick breath and looks up. “It’s okay though because my mother really only wants girls.”

“My Vairum Mama and Vani Mami’s boy baby passed on, too.”

“But they wanted him. Trust me.” Bharati looks like she knows more than she should. “What did your cousin die of?”

They hear Sita in the courtyard. “Janaki? Janaki? Okay, I’ve looked for her. I’m leaving.”

Janaki gets up. “Veena lesson. See you tomorrow.”

What did her cousin die of? Maybe Muchami can tell her. She has the feeling talking about it might upset her grandmother.

The next day, Janaki finds Muchami as he milks the cows. Even if she is too big now to go with him to his village, she still likes to spend time with him when he does chores, helping a little when she can.

“Muchami?”

He looks at her briefly and back at his work. “What do you want, Janaki-baby?”

She strokes the cow’s flank—it’s the oldest and the most calm of the three.

“I was wondering, do you know... how my cousin died?”

Muchami looks at her again, pursing his brow. “Vairum’s son, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” he says gently. “I don’t think there was a specific reason. It happens, unfortunately.”

Janaki nods.

“What makes you ask?” He finishes the milking and stands, holding his back.

“I was just thinking about it because someone I know, from school, told me all of her brothers died when they were babies, except one.”

“That must be very hard.”

“I suppose, except”—he question bursts forth, held against Janaki’s curiosity for so long—“my friend said that in her caste they only want girls! Have you ever heard of that?”

Muchami wags his head slowly.

“Why?” Janaki asks.

Muchami rubs his forehead. “There could be a few reasons. I’m not entirely sure.”

Janaki waits.

“Is that the girl I see out back sometimes?” he asks.

“Yes,” Janaki says. “She loves music. She comes to hear Vani Mami play.”

“I see.”

“She’s my best friend,” she confides, not that he would know what a privilege this is.

He doesn’t respond, and she feels a bit disgruntled: he might appreciate it just because she so clearly does. In silence, she helps him carry the milk in.

Ten days after Thangam’s delivery, Janaki and Sita are kept home from school to clean house and prepare for the baby’s eleventh-day naming ceremony. They spend the day bickering and being separated. Janaki manages to arrange her tasks so that she can listen to Vani’s morning session : she spends the time spinning wicks from cotton bolls and knotting jasmine blossoms, marigolds and roses into garlands with cotton twine.

Kamalam fills her day by doing whatever Janaki does, but less so: she spins more slowly, her wicks are thick and uneven, her garland knots loose. Today, she can do almost nothing, owing to tension: their father is expected. Kamalam has confessed to Janaki that she is afraid of Goli and wishes he weren’t coming. Janaki, who hasn’t seen him for a couple of years, recalls some feeling of fear, though she is also curious.

Sivakami is preoccupied and apprehensive, as much in anticipation of Goli’s arrival as of his potential failure to arrive. Vairum will be unpleasant in either circumstance. Sita, who idolizes their father loudly and frequently (though never in Vairum’s presence), is menacingly sweet today.

When Vani’s morning session ends, Janaki winds up her garland weaving and reports for her next task—making murrukku, fried lentil-flour snacks. It’s a chore the children compete for, and she has won the first shift. She takes up the tumbler portion of the murrukku-squeezing mechanism, selects a metal disk punched with star-shaped holes and drops it into the tumbler’s bottom to form a sieve. She scoops batter from the basin where Sivakami has prepared it, and fills the tumbler, then takes the compressor, double-handled like the tumbler, and fits its end into the tumbler’s top. Kamalam, too young for anything involving hot oil, squats in the doorway to watch.

Janaki holds the contraption over the bubbling oil and starts to squeeze, twirling it slightly to make the descending parallel lines loop as they hit the oil. The syllable “ka,”
appears, floating in the pot.

“Look, Kamalam, I’m writing your name!” Janaki makes a “ma,”
“ a ”la, ” “
”and an “im,”
” which bubble and bob in and out of sequence, becoming “mamkala” and “lakamma” as Kamalam, who cannot read, bends open-mouthed above the wok. Janaki fishes the now solid syllables from the oil, and lays them on a plate in sequence, then pulls the tumbler from the compressor and refills it.

“Make Sita,” says Kamalam, drawing closer and then back on a warning from Sivakami. Janaki does: the syllables “see” and “thaa,” “
”sink and rise, gold against the black iron.

Muchami peeks in from the courtyard where he is washing up, and Janaki writes him into the pot. “Mu,” “chaa,” “mi”—but of course he cannot read Tamil.

“This is the last one, what should it be?” Janaki asks, scraping up the last of the batter under Sivakami’s frugal eyes.

“Amma,” Kamalam suggests. Sivakami smiles and turns away, though she keeps looking as Janaki spells “ah,” “im,” “maa,”

Janaki and Kamalam wash up and, with Vani, are served their late-morning meal. Kamalam appears fascinated with Vani’s stories, though Janaki is not convinced her sister is really following them. Today’s was particularly worth missing school for: the story of Vani’s father’s second cousin who was kidnapped by a renegade band of dacoits and made to serve them for twelve years as a laundryman and spiritual adviser. His thumbs were cut off so that he could not use their stolen muskets against them, and when he was returned home, he was never again permitted in the family’s sanctum sanctorum because clearly he had not prepared his own food in that time and indeed had taken up with a concubine, who not only cooked for him but fed him from her own hand.

After the morning meal, the household naps. After tiffin, while Sita makes murrukku with unusual willingness but no attention at all to shape or symmetry, Janaki is excused to listen to Vani play.

She slips out the back, swings herself up against the mango tree, bracing her toes into near invisible notches on the trunk and standing, then sitting, on a branch about eight feet off the ground. She mastered this about a week ago, practising one Sunday morning when Bharati was not around.

Bharati arrives soon after and climbs up as well. Janaki has taken the better branch—slightly wider and higher up. Bharati takes the second choice—lower and narrower. From above and to their right, Vani commences playing “Akshayalinga Sankarabaranam,” a song for Shiva.

Janaki and Bharati begin to tap out the rhythm—they have just recently deciphered it. It seems to be three and a half beats: a short and a long tap on the back of the hand, two long taps on the front.

And they are humming along. Occasionally, Bharati and Janaki find themselves humming different things, each anticipating a different turn in the song, just as happens with Vani’s stories. But, increasingly, they find that even when they hum different things, neither sounds wrong, because they are both improvising on the raga, though neither will learn its name and formal properties for some years. And they don’t sound bad together. So there they are, tapping and humming, their two pairs of feet dangling from the foliage. They can’t see the back door from the courtyard and so don’t see it open and Sita step out, hot and cranky from completing the coveted chore, blinking oil-smoke tears. She hears the two to her left, though she can’t see them. She says, “Oh, you two songbirds fill our neighbourhood with beauty. We’re so lucky! You must promise me, Bharati, that you will sing at my wedding. And Janaki, you must sing at my funeral. Promise?”