The Toss of a Lemon (6 page)

Any of these ceremonies is individually sufficient to declare a man and woman one. But then the whole thing would be over so quickly, and how to choose among them? Bride and groom are jostled upon the shoulders of maternal uncles for the exchange of garlands; they feed each other bananas in sweetened milk; they pray, together and individually.

Three times a day, roughly corresponding to the ending of each ceremony, the gathering is fed. This does not include the many—early, late or simply hungry—who are fed in between. But three times daily, talk goes up a decibel as the gathering seats itself at rows of banana leaves laid out on the floor of the dining hall with the narrow end to the left. Each diner sprinkles the leaf with water, wipes it off with a hand, waits. The servers—hired help mixed with relatives—begin with a dollop of a gooey sweet onto the lower right corner of the leaf. The eaters lick this up: the first flavour to touch celebrants’ tongues must be sweet. Then along the half of the leaf above the bisecting vein, in order from left to right, are dished vegetables in dry and wet curries,
pacchadis
of yogourt and cucumber, of sun-cured mango with palm sugar or, in more fashionable homes, of shredded beet flavoured with essence of rose. The arrangement ends with
vadai,
deep-fried patties of lentil and chili, and a spicy pickle, say of lemon or baby mango, in the top right corner. Some sweet in the form of a square or ball goes on the lower left side of the leaf, along with
pappadum
to offset the mushy main item: rice, lower centre, without which this is not a real meal.

The first course is rice mixed with sambar, a thick lentil sauce; the second is rice with
rasam,
and thin lentil broth, which the diner must chase continually until it is eaten to keep it from running off the leaf. Next, another helping of the first sweet, warm and runny or sticky. Last, more rice, with home-brewed yogourt: “Scrubs the teeth and tongue!” Sivakami always overhears some pompous uncle saying to an uninterested youngster. “And aids the stomach in digestion!”

Flavours and textures and the order of a meal are arranged according to the
Shastras
that proclaim that if a meal is taken as prescribed, it will settle happily. Those who violate the prescriptions take their stomachs into their own hands.

In the afternoons, the corners of the hall, the small rooms adjacent to it, even the veranda, are heaped with sated, sleeping guests.

For days, it will continue: a ceremony peaking every few hours, every chant and gesture worn smooth as pebbles on the Kaveri riverbed by repeated practice since the Aryans first entered the south, bringing with them new gods and myths, pushing into the forests the fierce deities they found the darker natives worshipping; bringing with them a system for dividing people according to function, which the Portuguese, thousands of years later, would call caste. In halls such as these, they gather, the Brahmins, hardly newcomers now, yet slightly apart from this place where they have lived for millennia. The marriage fire forges another link in the chainmail of caste; every sound, sight and smell is a celebration of the clan.

When Sivakami and the others return from the wedding, Hanumarathnam still is not back. The next night, she lies awake, angry, though unsure whether she will say so. She has already wrapped packets of food to send the siddhas on their way, the third night she has done this, just in case they return. She doesn’t like their audacity and she doesn’t like their taking her husband, but she is never sure how to put that, or to whom. She hears him at the front, hurries to unlock the doors and fetches the food.

He has followed her, takes up the packets and goes back outside. Sivakami hears a musical voice mutter, “Where is the golden child? The transformation of your seed, your soul-breath?”

Hanumarathnam laughs a little and answers ruefully, “Yes, the only alchemy I have ever effected.”

“No less miraculous, brother. And she will grow, flesh upon bone, to face the trials of this well-worn cycle.”

“You are kind.”

“Blessings on her, and the next, and on your home,” replies the voice.

Her husband enters their house once more and locks the locks against the night and the moon’s glow, and all is as it should be. From deep down the Brahmin-quarter path, the cry floats back at them, “Here is a body, feed it!”

Hanumarathnam chuckles.

Sivakami’s objections are at a standstill. From anyone else, she would have had suspicions of
dhrishti,
evil eye, from such a compliment. Still, she goes and waves a fistful of salt over her daughter; it doesn’t hurt to take precautions. Siddhas don’t want family or home, so why would he put the evil eye on them? It’s not logical, not likely. She doesn’t let Hanumarathnam see her with the salt—he has no patience with superstition. She flushes the salt along the drain out the back of the courtyard and feels cleaner than she has for days.

Sivakami is much more mobile than she was with her first pregnancy, and keeps a closer eye on the hired help. The servants are a little resentful but do not take her too seriously.

Every pregnancy has its peculiar discomforts, though. This time, Sivakami finds it hardest when the baby kicks or she squats. His swimming within her is like being prodded with an iddikki, an iron pot-tongs, all angles and edges.

She says “him” because she knows—and her knowledge is bordered with single-minded wishing—that this baby will be a boy. If you have a girl and a boy, it doesn’t so much matter what the others are after that. Everyone says you raise a girl for someone else—you pay for her wedding and then the fruits of your investment are enjoyed by others. She is the wealth that leaves your family. A boy is the wealth that stays. Still, you must have a girl
and
a boy, a girl, then a boy, or a boy and then a girl, but she already has a girl ... Everything is going so well, it would be very hard to have a disappointment now.

She has seen couples who seem very happy for the early years of their marriages. Then, if they have no children, they enter a state of suspension. If they have girl after girl, they enter a state of constant worry. The ones with boy after boy, though, say, “Oh, yes, shame, isn’t it, seven sons, we would have liked a girl, but at least we will have grandchildren and our boys to live with in our old age!”

And the parents of five girls say nothing but wonder if one of their daughters will be tending these idiots in their dotage, and make a mental note not to let it happen.

Disappointment and lack of change wear down the life of a couple, she concludes. It should not happen. In her last trimester, she takes some quasi-medical advice from old ladies to ensure it does not: rubbing holy ash on her belly and using compresses of fresh herbs they gather for her at specific times of day.

Finally, she is off to her mother’s house for the delivery. Her husband comes just before the birth. He hands the lemon to the barber’s wife and reminds her, “As soon as you see the top of the baby’s head.”

She nods, she nods, she waves him away. He says over his shoulder, finger wagging in the air as he is shunted out the door, “It’s very important!”

May as well be shouting to the trees. The trees, in fact, nod at him condescendingly as he enters the garden, and then they, too, ignore him. No choice but to take up his position, to pace and fret.

No one pays him much mind because he is behaving like any expectant father. He wishes his concerns were those of any expectant father. He wishes he were just concerned for the health of his wife and baby. Instead, he is concerned for himself—a concern that has pursued him ever since he first pursued Sivakami.

A man must marry. A man must have children. But what if a man’s horoscope—the weakest quadrant, but nonetheless—says he will die in the ninth year of his marriage? Because of its placement, this really is not likely to happen, but it is difficult not to feel qualms. But say a son is born at an auspicious moment: the conflagration of father’s and son’s stars, the conflation of their horoscopes, could change destiny. A son has the ability, with his birth, to assure his father’s longevity. Some people think of children as a means to immortality; Hanumarathnam doesn’t want to live forever but wouldn’t mind just a few more years. Then, the boy’s birth might make no difference at all, in which case he will live with the same uncertainty as everyone else.

With Thangam, he had no such worry, because he had a strong feeling the first would be a daughter. He was not ready for a boy, then. He was not ready to know. This time he does not know even if this child is a boy. He might be pacing and fretting for another girl.

Nothing to do but wait.

Hanumarathnam stomps the garden to a pulp while, within, Sivakami concentrates on the hardest thing she’s ever done.

“Oh,” says the barber’s wife. “Hmm ... well ... don’t worry,” she mutters, as though encouraging herself.

“What?” Sivakami pants.

“Bum first. No matter.” She nods at Sivakami. “We’re going to have to do this fast, all right? It’s your second time at this, you know what you’re doing ...”

Sivakami feels another contraction coming on and the barber’s wife commands, “Get it out!”

A few moments later, Hanumarathnam hears a squalling. He throws his arms up in frustration, notes the time, goes to the window and yells, “Lemon!”

It is hurled out the window at him, but he pays no attention. “Girl or boy?” he shouts.

“Boy!”

A boy. The barber’s wife finishes wiping the child and hands him to Sivakami with the suppressed satisfaction of one who has accomplished a feat much more difficult than those around her appreciate. Sivakami doesn’t even look at her as she receives her son. He’s a little skinny, and darker than his parents, though she doesn’t notice either of these qualities until her sisters-in-law point them out. The baby calms as she rocks him and starts to sing a nursery rhyme that was one of her own favourites as a child. He opens his eyes to gaze at her, his irises nearly black yet strangely brilliant, diamond sharp.

“Onnay onnu, Kannay kannu.”
“Only one, one, as an eye, an eye.”
When there is only one, how precious is that son.

SIVAKAMI IS AT ONCE PROUD AND COMPLACENT——complacent because she knew she would deliver a boy, and proud that she took every available measure to ensure it. When she emerges from her dive into her new baby’s eyes, she asks about Thangam. Since no good wife can say her husband’s name, everyone understands she’s asking after her husband. She expects to hear his voice responding. Instead, her youngest sister-in-law walks Thangam to the door of the birth room and tells Sivakami, obviously curious to see her reaction, “He’s gone already.”

Sivakami feels an unjustifiable pang.

At Thangam’s birth, Hanumarathnam had called to his wife, “I hear she’s a beauty—won’t tell a soul. I’ll return. Send word if you want anything.”

His presence at his children’s births was highly unconventional, after all. He attended only because he trusted no one else to record their birth times and make the consequent calculations.

Sivakami tells herself if he hadn’t said those few words to her after Thangam’s birth she wouldn’t be feeling this disappointment; she tells herself it is far more proper for him to leave, saying nothing, and return for the eleventh-day ceremonies as though he’d never come before; she tells herself he was too excited the first time and couldn’t restrain himself, but now he’s more mature. She tells herself he’s overwhelmed with emotion because she delivered a boy. She doesn’t tell herself that none of these excuses suffices.

Hanumarathnam is fleeing. He speeds, to the degree that he can in a bullock cart, toward his home and his instruments: his home, where he can think straight, and his instruments, which will tell him, finally, his fate.

He reaches Cholapatti as the sun is setting, at that time of day when what is known appears unknown. A sickened feeling in the pit of his stomach has nothing to do with village roads and the swaying cart. He says nothing about it to himself because that would be fatalism: a person irresponsibly deciding, on some caprice, that a terrible fate awaits him. Such a man will be continually preoccupied with his doom until something, anything, happens so he can say, “Aha! You see! I am doomed, it was not my imagination!”

Hanumarathnam has no patience with such whimsy. Destiny can be read precisely, scientifically, and this is precisely, scientifically, what he intends to do. Only after that, if necessary, will he fall into despair. Or sink into relief: he keeps himself optimistic.

On the Cholapatti rooftop, he works through the night. He notes his son’s birth time and birth location in tables, then creates other tables to repeat the calculations from different angles and starting points, checking them one against another, consulting charts and books. Every equation takes him back in time, so changed is the sky already from the moment whose influences he is enumerating as the night moves past the moon.

Every so often, he peers through his telescope, scavenged by a distant relative from the house of a dying British surveyor and bon vivant, and brought to Hanumarathnam in recognition of his talents. Where his ancestors relied on handed-down documents, he, always interested in other traditions’ teachings, supplements his Vedic calculations with measurements he has learned to make using telescopic observations.

He brings the stars close, through the lenses; he looks in their eyes. To those who merely admire the heavens, as they admire a new building in the city or another man’s wife, alterations in the sky are mere degrees of difference. They are interesting to observe, chart, identify. They are fine to forget. But, as all experiences, however fleeting or superficial, leave residues, so the moment-by-moment turning of heavenly bodies has momentous repercussions.

Hanumarathnam, all too fully aware of the ability of the heavens to sustain life, bring death and cause all the ups and downs in between, cannot simply stare in dumbfounded awe for a couple of seconds at the beauty of the skies and then go down to supper and sleep. What he sees writ is destinies untold.