The Toss of a Lemon (53 page)

“What would be really nice, right now, Sita,” she suggests, “is if you would play a little song on the veena for Visalam’s in-laws. She’s been taking lessons.”

The crowd murmurs approval.

Janaki tries to catch her grandmother’s eye: if they do have further designs on Visalam’s family, Sita’s playing won’t help in this aim. But Sivakami doesn’t notice her. And what is Sita thinking? She is taking her place behind Vani’s veena, sporting a little grin. Even she cannot possibly think she will suddenly become a virtuoso player just because she wants to impress? Janaki slowly brings her hands up to her ears, whether in a gesture of dismay or to block out sound is impossible to tell, but Kamalam unconsciously imitates her, two little monkeys guarding against the same evil. Sivakami catches Janaki’s eye then, and, annoyed, makes a gesture as though to bat their hands down, and the girls lower their hands to their laps.

Sita begins to play. Her song, “Sami Varnam,” sounds like the breath of a wounded animal. At first, the in-laws look as if each has been hit on the forehead with a clay pot. Then, as each notices the look on the others’ faces, they begin, once more, to laugh. They don’t mean to laugh at the music: they are not rude people. They are laughing at each other. Sivakami looks uncertain, almost as if she wants to enjoy their enjoyment. Sita is oblivious, grunting a little as she tries to control the bucking beast of sound beneath her fingers.

A shadow falls on the veena and the girl looks up to find Vani standing over her. Vani makes a flicking motion with one hand, and Sita abandons her song mid-strain. She rises and stumbles back. The bubbles of laughter have nearly all burst, bright, wet, prismatic.

Vani retunes the instrument. Sita looks around, blinking as though she has just awoken, and the laughter starts up again. Vani begins playing “Sami Varnam,” the same song, so naturally it sounds like a rebuke, though Janaki is willing to believe that’s not how she intends it. An elementary item in the south Indian classical repertoire, it’s a song occasionally used as a warm-up, and it is Vani’s regular time to play.

There’s a motion in the southwest corner of the hall, nearest the kitchen. Thangam is cranking the phonograph and laying the needle into its groove. Is this Thangam’s own rebuke, or her way of joining in? Janaki had forgotten the record started with “Sami Varnam,” and now Vani and the absent Madras musician are twinned, like the baby in the main hall, brought out for the naming ceremony, and the one hidden upstairs.

Sita, a tear starting down her cheek, runs straight out the back of the house, bumping into two walls in her haste.

Sivakami quietly tells Janaki to follow her sister.

Janaki doesn’t find Sita under the trees, or anywhere on the way to the canal, so, at the canal, she turns right, toward town. Head down, watching one foot place itself before the other in the mud, she bumps into Bharati, walking in just the same manner toward Sivakami’s house. Bharati’s maidservant Draupadi follows behind.

“Have you seen Sita?” Janaki inquires.

“Yeah, where was she going?”

“Where did it look like she was going?”

“I don’t know. Town?”

“I guess. I’m supposed to find her. Are you coming?”

“Isn’t Vani Amma playing? Hey,” Bharati stands and listens.

“Have you got someone visiting you?”

“No, no. It’s the gramophone.” Janaki doesn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of the toy. “Come on, come with me.”

They emerge at the main road and look in both directions. It is a market day, and the crowds are thick.

Bharati points east toward the next crossroads. “Is that her?

Janaki squints. She is hearing drums, bells and shouting, a non-Brahmin funeral procession, and now catches sight of Sita, a flash of terracotta paavaadai against the similar red-brown of the road.

“Yes, yes, come, let’s hurry.” She and Bharati weave up the road, dodging bullock carts and baskets, and then are engulfed by a huge herd of goats, going the opposite way. They cannot move until the animals are past, but the goats’ motion makes them feel they are flowing forward, as in water. Janaki loves goats almost as much as calves. She thinks it’s charming that the babies have just the same proportions as the grown-ups, tiny, like dolls. She taps each one on the forehead as it bawls past her.

There: Sita is halted at the fore of the crowd preceding the funeral procession, either stymied by the crush or watching the proceedings.

The dead man must be a Chettiar, Janaki thinks: he reclines on a huge bier of bright flowers. No Brahmin would go in for this kind of show. Ten impassive young fellows beat drums with curved sticks. Two or three men and one woman jump around, very worked up, nearly off their rockers with grief-for-hire. The drums and wailing are mesmerizing and though both Janaki and Bharati have received many warnings against getting too close to funeral processions, they draw closer.

Six little men carry the bier. It dips and rocks as they struggle against their sweaty palms and the surging of the crowd. One of them suddenly catches the fever of the paid mourners’ dance and starts shaking the bier as the others struggle to keep it steady. He is thrashing his body around and moaning, but not letting go, gripping tight even as someone tries to prise the pole from him.

Edging and shoving through the crowd, Janaki has nearly reached her immobile sister. The head of the great big corpse flops to one side and Janaki catches a glimpse of the face. She is startled to recognize him: N. Ranga Chettiar. She hadn’t heard that he died. She had seen Vairum chatting with him outside Minister and Gayatri’s house several weeks ago.

As the bier passes Sita, the bearer who caught the dance leaps, frenzied, away from the bier. The man walking beside him catches it in time, but he is very tall, and as he rises to his full height, the head flops, forcefully, toward the girls. The Chettiar’s eyes are open.

Janaki puts her hand on Sita’s arm.

Sita shudders. Janaki glances toward the corpse and back at her sister.

“Sita?” Janaki shakes her sister’s arm and repeats loudly, “Sita.”

Sita ignores her. There’s nothing Janaki hates more. She shakes her sister’s arm again, roughly, then takes her shoulder and spins Sita around to face her. “Sita!”

Sita speaks. “Palani veeboothi!”

The voice that comes out is not her own and Janaki jumps. Sita says it again: Holy ash from Palani mountain! There is something odd about her face. She is looking not directly at Janaki, but slightly off to the right.

“Palani veeboothi!” Sita shouts again.

“I heard you!” Janaki, on tiptoe, examines her, and makes the tone of her voice gentler when she asks, “Is something wrong?”

“Palani veeboothi!” Sita booms again.

“Would you stop shouting this!”

Even under such strained circumstances, they bicker.

“I am dead!” Sita proclaims. Bharati has caught up with them, and takes Sita’s other arm with a look of concern.

“Stop that, Sita,” Janaki says sternly. “Amma said ...”

“I am dead! I am Ranga Chettiar!” Sita exclaims. “She looked, I came! She looked, I came!”

“Shush.” Janaki shudders. “What about Palani veeboothi?”

“Palani veeboothi!” Sita says loudly into the space to Janaki’s right. “I must have holy ash from Palani mountain, to cleanse my soul of guilt and memory.”

One or two people are looking their way. Janaki, feeling very strange, indicates that Bharati should help her lead Sita out of the crowd. Sita seems to walk all right, if a bit stiffly. Bharati speaks across Sita’s glassy gaze.

“The Chettiar’s life force must have jumped into her. I’ve heard of that.”

“You have?”

“My mother’s sister,” Bharati says. “It happened to her when she was very young. That’s why unmarried girls aren’t supposed to see funeral processions. We’re vulnerable.”

“Oh, God.” Janaki feels sick with anxiety. “Sita shouldn’t have gone so close. God, Amma is going to be so mad.”

“Palani veeboothi!”

“Shut up!” Janaki yells at whoever has taken up residence in her sister. “Is that all you need, to leave my sister? If we get you Palani veeboothi, will you go away?”

“Only Palani veeboothi can cleanse my soul of guilt and memory,” the Chettiar affirms.

They lead Sita home, taking her in by the back entrance, partly because Bharati, as a non-Brahmin, cannot walk on the Brahmin quarter, partly because Janaki would rather the neighbours not know before her grandmother does. Vani is still playing, though the gramophone has stopped. For a moment, the girls stand at the back door. Even the dead give respect to Vani’s playing, it appears: Sita is silent. Janaki leads her sister in and sits her in the courtyard while Bharati goes to sit under their usual tree, a few steps from the back door. Janaki takes a long look at Sita’s face, its expression addled yet intent: the look of someone with a single desire. Janaki leaves Sita in the courtyard, telling her firmly not to move.

By now, the jolly in-laws have departed. Vairum lies on the floor of the hall, listening to his wife’s music. Thangam is huddled in the corner by the gramophone. Everything looks highly normal. Janaki seeks Sivakami and finds her in the garden, looking critically at one of the mango trees, while Muchami squats beside it.

“Amma?”

“Mm?” Sivakami looks up. “Did you bring Sita home?”

“Sort of.”

The song from the living room ends, and Janaki hears a voice boom in the silence, “Palani veeboothi!”

She and her grandmother look at each other and hurry from the garden to the back of the cowshed, and from there through a door into the courtyard. Sita is a terracotta streak of silk and skin exiting the back door where Bharati catches her and holds her fast. Muchami is with them in a flash and takes hold of Sita just as Bharati is losing her strength. As Muchami pulls the struggling, writhing Sita over the threshold into the courtyard, Sivakami asks, “What happened?”

Janaki begins to explain, and Sivakami goes to close the courtyard door, glancing quizzically at the girl standing just beyond the threshold, a girl she doesn’t know.
What
luck
she
was passing! she thinks, though she doesn’t say anything to her, just nods a little. Perhaps
a
child of one of the
Brahmin-quarter
servants, though
awfully well-dressed for
that. Bharati doesn’t move, but stands looking at Sivakami, her chin raised, while Sivakami closes and bolts the courtyard door.

As soon as Sivakami hears the Chettiar’s demand, she dispatches Janaki to get some holy ash from the people three houses down who just got back from the Palani hills day before yesterday. And to get the priest from the temple. Vani resumes her playing, which calms Sita once more. They induce her to sit on a mat in the courtyard, since she has been multiply polluted: by Bharati’s touch, by Muchami’s, and of course by inhabitation by the spirit of a dead Chettiar. Janaki pictures Bharati sitting out back and realizes they shut the door in a panic without saying bye or thanks. But for Bharati, Sita could have been God knows where right now. I’ll
apologize
tomorrow, Janaki thinks.

The neighbour insists on bringing the holy ash herself, after changing her sari and refreshing her hair. She can sniff out a gossip opportunity anywhere within a ten-mile radius. By the time Janaki returns home with the priest, there are no fewer than ten people sitting and clicking their tongues in the front hall and occasionally going through the kitchen to peep at the now prone girl. The priest administers the ash externally, on the forehead and throat, and internally, a pinch on the tongue, then everyone sits around and waits.

After about two hours of muttering and twitching, Sita’s skinny frame leaps to its feet. She goose-steps to the well and draws a bucket of water. Face skyward, she dumps the bucket of water unceremoniously over her head. Three seconds later, her body gives a great heave and a shudder and collapses to the ground.

A cry goes up among the watchers, and they pick her up and carry her into the hall. She is feverish and barely conscious, but restored to herself.

They are settling her in the hall and congratulating one another on the success of the treatment—Janaki thinks they are acting a bit too much as if they thought of it, forgetting it was in fact the dead man’s own suggestion—when Goli bursts through the door like unwelcome relief. He has a wild look in his eye, and today is extra dandy, with bowler hat and cane.

“My brother-in-law has called me!” Goli announces. “Such an honour!”

What he says is true; Vairum awaits him on the roof. Goli sweeps through the hordes of gigglers and gossipers and general hangers-on in a single noisy motion. Sivakami and Gayatri join Muchami in the garden, where they can hear the conversation beginning above. Gayatri and Muchami, in whom Sivakami has confided, look at each other with conspiratorial hope and then turn their attention inward and upward.

“I’m interested in the cinema, Goli Athimbere.” Vairum must not even have given Goli time to sit. Sivakami winces, wishing Vairum were better about observing niceties. He is standing, and they can see his hands and head for a second at the balustrade; then he walks away.

“The cinema is an enormously interesting proposition,” Goli agrees. “Do you know—”

“I know, I know,” Vairum interrupts. “Look—”

“Oh, I’m looking, Vairum,” Goli says, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “I’m looking.”

Sivakami shakes her head.

“Okay,” Vairum goes on. “I don’t know what you know, but you do know that these are tricky times for investment, which is the whole reason all these possibilities are...” Vairum is uncharacteristically searching for words.

“Possible? That’s only a part of it. Naturally, a part of it, but a person needs a nose for these things. It’s not everyone who can get on board.” Goli’s voice sounds as if he is marching pompously back and forth across the roof.