The Toss of a Lemon (52 page)

Sivakami is in the kitchen and doesn’t hear Vairum’s remark, but hears the main hall grow silent.

“Not at all, Vairum,” Goli smiles tightly. “I don’t know when things have gone as well. So many opportunities opening up. A person just has to know how to take advantage.”

“You certainly know how to take advantage, Athimbere,” Vairum spits. “That is definitely one of your strong suits.”

“I’m sure we all prefer not to know what you are talking about, Vairum, but what I am talking about”—Goli opens his face like a late-season sunflower to the rest of the company—“is investment. I’m sure there are many present who wouldn’t mind knowing how to improve fortunes grown paltry with time.”

“Investing with you, Athimbere, would be the equivalent of burying one’s wealth and forgetting the location.” Vairum flicks his hand twice toward his leaf, folds it toward himself and stands. “But anyone stupid enough to give you his money deserves to lose it.”

“Vairum!” Sivakami says from the kitchen. “That’s bad manners.”

“No, Amma.” Vairum sighs fast and wearily. “It’s a warning. I would hate, I would really hate to see anyone in this room lose money he can ill afford.”

“How disrespectful can a man be? Listen to your mother!” Goli shrills. “You keep your head in the clouds and act superior to try to keep the people of your village beneath you. They are not fooled!”

“So they’ll do what they choose.” Vairum disappears out the back.

“You are not fooled,” Goli commands those around him, and they all wag their heads, “No, no, yes, yes.”

The hall empties of the men, who go to the veranda to chew betel and chew over the latest gossip. Inside, the women sit to eat, including Vani, whose bright chatter is not dulled by the events of the morning. Janaki receives a welcome bonus: Vani’s story changes today. Now the dacoits cut off their own thumbs as part of their initiation ritual. Their weapons are adapted. Vani’s relative cooks and feeds them from his own hand, as he also does his thumbless lover, who had cut off her own digits as a gesture of unity with her first lover, killed young in a raid on a Hyderabad
haveli.
None of the other children had paid attention enough to realize they are lucky to be present at the change; none is paying attention now.

Saradha has her daughter the next week. The house throbs and surges with children, children having children, children expecting children, steaming milk and screaming mouths and Vani’s music, which beats like the sound of peace dovetailed with conflict.

Around this time, Sivakami is approached with a strange request. The neighbour two houses down, all of whose grandchildren have died at birth, asks Sivakami if she might birth her daughter’s next child. Sivakami is insulted and flattered—decorum means she can’t comply, while sympathy makes it difficult to turn the woman down. Gayatri hits upon a solution: if Sivakami can’t lend her hands, she can lend her handiwork. Sivakami doubtfully offers the family one of the scenes she has worked, an episode in the life of Krishna, the invincible child. She threads beads onto a string and sews the ends to the piece to make a necklace. Her neighbours gracefully accept. Some weeks after the daughter of their house, with the talisman hanging around her neck, gives birth to a healthy child, Sivakami receives another request. Sivakami fulfills it but worries that there is something untoward in this. She hides it from Vairum, who doesn’t pay much attention to the comings and goings of women and children from their house. She is not sure why she is uncomfortable disclosing the new vogue: perhaps because it is superstitious behaviour and she knows how he feels about that. Perhaps because she is helping others to have children.

Sivakami readies Thangam to go to Malapura. It has been thirty days since Krishnan’s birth and so it’s time for Goli to fetch her, but Thangam and Sivakami know how this usually goes: the packing and waiting, the unpacking and being taken off guard. This time, though, things might be different, since Goli hasn’t left Cholapatti in the weeks since his arrival.

He sleeps at the local chattram, not only dropping in on Sivakami more frequently than ever he did when he lived nearby, but occasionally convening his cronies around the veranda, where he tosses out schemes and schematics, logics and logistics, and figures vague or specific but always theoretical. The small group of men around the veranda is composed, Muchami tells Sivakami, of men who have faith in him despite that earlier mishap, including a couple who are hoping that, if they support him a little more, they might make their money back.

Sivakami hears, via eavesdropping and Muchami, Goli promoting a train-wheel foundry; a touring, and then a stationary, rice mill; a stationary, and then a touring, cinema; a stable of stud bulls; and a soap and petticoat depot.

Now: Sivakami is no businesswoman, though she keeps well abreast of Vairum’s instructions to Muchami with regard to the management of the lands. She rarely understands in advance how a purchase or sale or other strategic change will benefit them, but she more or less apprehends such matters in retrospect. She is also an excellent manager of household expenses, keeping Thangam’s manjakkani entirely separate from her dowry, separate expenses and separate income. Weddings are paid for from the dowry lands and the children’s daily expenses from the manjakkani, while Sivakami’s own paltry expenses are paid by Vairum. She accounts for every paisa, recording these in a ledger kept in the floor desk in the main hall.

So Sivakami knows they are about to run a surplus on the dowry monies. The next wedding to be arranged is Sita’s. She is ten, and were it not for a law recently passed against child marriage, it would be time to marry her off. As it is, they now must wait four years. Why should that money sit gathering dust? Sivakami thinks, influenced, it seems, by this new spirit of investment and improvement inflating her son and son-in-law. She doesn’t pretend to know any method of increasing money other than saving, nor does she think Goli has much money sense, but what if they were to support one of Goli’s schemes, with Vairum as a collaborator of sorts? Vairum has such an instinct for finance that it would surely then succeed. Sivakami starts to imagine the money being transformed into comfort for Thangam and her children, and a rapprochement between Goli and Vairum. Maybe Goli could become independent of his employment income! Maybe they could settle down in one place. Maybe close to here. Deep in a sleepless night, she conjures a good life for the new baby, Krishnan, her beading forgotten in her lap.

The next day, she opens the subject as she serves Vairum his morning meal.

“Vairum, kanna, let me talk to you about something.”

Vairum looks skeptical, as always with his mother, as though he has more important things on his mind. Sivakami serves the sambarpearl onion, his favourite—and bitter-gourd curry.

“You know that child-marriage outlawing nonsense means we must wait at least four years to marry Sita off,” she says. “So we have a surplus of cash that you will surely double by the time we need it.”

Vairum now looks wary.

Sivakami plunges on. “So I was wondering: why not give a show of family support? I know you will say your brother-in-law is not a good money manager...”

Vairum snorts at Sivakami’s delicate understatement.

“... but if you were to give some advice, some consulting, he might do well. The schemes don’t sound so far-fetched, and think how much it would mean to your sister.” Sivakami is gaining confidence—Vairum is listening. “And really: that dowry money is under your management, but technically, it belongs to them.”

At this last point of argument, Vairum’s expression turns sour. “He does not need to be reminded of that, Amma, though it seems he doesn’t dare remind us. Okay. I’ll consider investing in the cinema. I’ve been thinking of something like that anyway. My own money, not theirs. For Thangam Akka. I have no confidence in my brother-in-law, but if this will shut him up, it might be worth it. It’s obviously what he came here for. Maybe this will make him go away.”

Sivakami overlooks the rudeness of the last in consideration of her victory. It’s true that Goli has been obviously hoping to bring Vairum on board. Sivakami lets herself dream vaguely of a real success for Goli—a father capable of looking after his children, a man they can respect. Were she to force herself to think clearly and coldly about this, the fantasy would be unsustainable. She has seen no behaviour from Goli to make her believe in such a dream. But Vairum is dark, clear and cold, while Sivakami is none of these, and sees no need to be.

Now VISALAM GIVES BIRTH TO TWIN BOYS, having had a girl here a couple of years ago. As is customary, though, until the babies are out of danger from the evil eye, close neighbours and more distant relatives will be lied to and one baby will be kept hidden at all times. Sivakami makes the children solemnly swear to keep the babies under wraps, but if she knew how to listen to Vani’s music, she would hear that Vani is giving the secret away. Her music now features a strange new doubling, each note of the keening played in chorus.

And since there are only two people in Cholapatti who make a real effort to listen to Vani’s music, the other one gets suspicious.

Bharati corners Janaki in the schoolyard and demands, “Okay, what happened with Visalam’s baby? When little Krishnan was born, and Saradha’s baby, Vani’s music was strange, but now it’s different.”

“I can’t say.” Janaki stands in front of her friend, trying to think of how to get away. No information Bharati desires has ever successfully been withheld from her.

Sita passes them and hisses, “Get away from her, Janaki. Their kind kills boys.”

Janaki feels Bharati shudder, and hisses back, “It’s you, Sita, who’ll bring the evil eye on the house with all your death-talking. Amma said.”

She leads Bharati away by the elbow as though from a secret wound as Sita taunts them, “Amma said. Amma said.”

Bharati pulls her arm away from Janaki and walks quickly to a clump of coconut palms in the farthest corner of the schoolyard. Janaki trots after her, saying, “Wait. Wait.” Bharati leans against one of the trees, looking hard at the ground.

“Bharati. I’ll...” Janaki touches her friend’s arm. “You know Sita is always talking nonsense, just for sport. Listen,” she says, knowing she is about to betray her family for the first time. “Visalam had twins. Now you know. Swear you won’t tell,” she adds aggressively, as though her real motive had been to cement their friendship through the offering up of this sacrifice.

“Sita’s right, for once.” Bharati looks threatening and Janaki takes a step back. “Why do you think only one of my brothers lived? My mother can’t afford boys. She thinks I don’t know, but I watched her once, grinding pebbles into the baby’s porridge, and a week later, he died. I get chicken and eggs, look how strong I am! And the baby boy gets stones.”

Janaki takes another step back, and Bharati steps forward and yells at her, “Run, then! Run away!”

But Janaki is too bewildered to run, too scared to ask why boys would be expensive in Bharati’s caste, and once she thinks about it, a little suspicious of whether Bharati might be making up stories.

“I’m not running,” she defies her friend.

They are quiet for a time.

“Are you still going to come and listen to the music?” Janaki eventually asks.

Bharati looks at her. “Sure.”

“Don’t tell anyone about the twins,” Janaki adds, now that they’re speaking again. “Okay?”

Visalam’s husband and a gaggle of in-laws arrive for the newest babies’ eleventh-day ceremony. Kamalam adores the in-laws and follows them about like a small dog, smiling whenever they look at her. Janaki can’t summon much jealousy over this temporary crush and is moved to joke during the feast, “Maybe you should marry into this family, too.”

Kamalam, who takes everything Janaki says seriously, turns gravely to Visalam. “Please, Visalam Akka, can I marry your in-laws too?”

Visalam hugs Kamalam close, her maternal flesh wobbling as she giggles. “Yes, there are many eligible young men in the family. We just have to choose the right one for you. What should he be like?”

“I don’t know.” Kamalam’s response is muffled by the hug.

“Oh, come now.” Visalam pokes Kamalam in the ribs. “You don’t want to end up with someone like my husband, do you?”

Kamalam pulls away and buries her face in her hands. “I said, I don’t know.”

Saradha, who is also looking a little broad and matronly following the birth of her fourth child, attempts to enter into the spirit of the moment. “It’s Sita’s marriage that we need to arrange next, isn’t it? How old are you, Sita?” The younger girl doesn’t answer so Saradha answers herself. “Ten years completed already! It’s time, I say, time for a big party in Pudhukkottai or Pondicherry—somewhere French, where they haven’t passed laws against girls marrying in time!”

The varied volume and quality of laughter around the room demonstrates the variety of opinion around Madras Presidency on the child marriage law, and its attendant problems and solutions. Saradha persists.