The Toss of a Lemon (61 page)

Less than two bumpy hours later, they arrive in Konam. Goli springs to his feet so that Janaki flies out of his way. Left behind in the queue to disembark, she gets down off the bus and looks frantically for her father. He is making a purchase, a few feet from the door of the bus—ugly, overpriced dolls. “Navaratri dolls!” the vendor is shouting while wrapping and making change. “Beautiful for your golu! Buy them all!”

“Look but don’t buy,” Janaki has been trained by Sivakami; her father clearly has not. His policy seems to be “Buy but don’t look,” she smirks to herself, then rebukes herself smartly.

They ramble toward their host’s house, Goli buying sweets, flowers, magazines, generous with tips, generous with beggars. He keeps asking Janaki if she wants anything. She refuses mutely; he shrugs and buys more. He got paid the day before—Janaki had heard her parents arguing about whom he owes. The argument was short; Thangam fell silent as soon as he yelled.

Before they left the house, Thangam gave Janaki bus fare, which she tucked into the waist of her paavaadai.

They arrive at Goli’s friends’ house, a small bungalow set in a garden, a twenty-minute walk from the bus depot and market square, practically in the centre of town. Goli has not said how he knows these people.

They step over the threshold into the salon, a claustrophobic room crammed with several rattan-strung recliners, side tables with doilies, a mahogany display case full of dolls and the radio. While Gayatri and Minister’s radio stands about two feet, on a table in Minister’s upstairs salon, this one stands on the floor, almost four feet.

Janaki considers the radio the best invention ever. The gramophone she thinks a novelty item at best, though it brings music to those who are non-electrified and non-musical—because of course no machine can take the place of a veena and someone who knows how to play it. Tonight the radio will bring Vani herself, in all her mature genius. Oh, how Janaki has missed this music. Her fingertips throb, her forehead tingles, her heart is doing something akin to salivation as she waits to hear what she has heard so little in the two and a half years since Vani and Vairum moved to Madras. Before radio, only Vairum had the power to bring Vani and take her away.

Goli presents their hosts with dolls, sweets, flowers. The husband emits clucks of delight and dismissal. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” His wife raises her eyebrows as if smiling. She isn’t. Janaki feels chilled. It has begun again to rain outside.

Goli and the husband sit in the chairs, Janaki in the little floor space remaining, close by the radio. The wife stands behind her husband. Goli does not let slip a single opportunity to remind his hosts of how closely he is related to tonight’s featured performer. The husband is impressed and excited. Janaki thinks maybe that little sneer mark to the right of her hostess’s nose is just the way the poor woman’s face is made. But when their daughter, who is about Janaki’s age, comes in to say good night, the mark dissolves in a face suffused with pride and love.

The daughter sees the guests and asks, “What are they here for?”

In Tamil it is polite to refer to people in the third person, but the girl’s tone is rude in any language. Her mother replies, “Their female relative is playing veena. On the radio.”

The girl raises her eyebrows and scrunches her lips. She returns to the other room.

Goli says, “I’m sure your daughter would love to stay and listen! She can sit with my daughter. Vani, my own sister-in-law, would be honoured.”

The sneer returns as their hostess explains, “We don’t approve of Brahmin women playing in public. We would never permit our daughter to listen to such a display.”

Her husband giggles as though in apology and leaps to switch on the radio, saying, “Not five minutes now! Best give it a chance to warm up!”

The radio’s initial whine and crackle always make Janaki shiver with excitement. Even her hostess, whom she now hates, cannot dampen the electric thrill. The whine thins, the crackle settles like a good fire, and a sombre voice announces: V. Vani.

At the sound of tuning, Janaki closes her eyes to all those around her. The musician is unmistakably her aunt. The program mixes adventurous and conservative choices, though even the best-known songs are made unfamiliar by her aunt’s rhythmic and stylistic innovations. Janaki keeps her eyes shut tight, listening for old favourites and for new songs she herself might learn.

Not bothering with an introductory varnam, Vani launches into an improvisational aalapanai in “Begada Raga,” and then segues into the recital proper with “Vallabha Nayakasya,” a meditative and richly emotional prayer to Lord Ganesha, god of new beginnings. Janaki recalls the little wooden Ganesha that Vairum used to keep in a lamp niche near the entrance of his and Vani’s quarters. Janaki never entered their room but would see the statuette when she climbed the stairs to the roof. The roughly carved little figure was shiny with age, its back blackened with lamp smoke. Once, Janaki, curious, picked it up and was surprised at how light it was. The tiny statue went with her uncle and aunt to Madras when they moved, and Janaki felt that this signified more than anything the permanence of their leave-taking.

The second song in Vani’s program is “Sakala Kala Vani,” a melodious, feminine piece with tightly shaped verses, a tribute to the goddess Saraswati, one of the triumvirate of female deities whose festival they were celebrating. She wraps up the first part of the concert with a song Janaki has never heard. The announcer gives the title, “Chinnan Cheeru Killiyai Kannama,” by Subramania Bharatiyar, whose name, at least, Janaki recognizes. He’s not one of the ancients, but rather a Tamil nationalist poet who died not long before Janaki was born—it was an accident, she thinks, involving an elephant, maybe? Janaki has heard of musicians, recently, setting Bharatiyar’s poetry to music. Listening to Vani now, she is intrigued and frustrated: each time she thinks she starts to get the raga, it seems to change. If Vani only lived with them still, Janaki would have heard her practicing. She might even have been able to play this piece by now.

She opens her eyes slowly. Her host is sitting rapt and respectful. His wife’s sneer has deepened. Possibly, to be kind to her, she is unable to appreciate what she has just heard. Goli is sticking to the line that he is related to a genius.

“Marvellous, wasn’t it? What virtuosity! What excellence of technique ! To think, how many times have I heard her in the privacy of my mother-in-law’s village home. And here she is playing for the whole of the presidency more or less. Isn’t that something!” Then he stands, holding his palms together. “Well, we’d better make a move.”

Janaki starts.

Their hostess looks at her and speaks to Goli, “Oh, must you?”

Janaki stammers, “We can’t... the second half...” The announcer had told listeners to stay tuned through the interval—Vani would be playing “Jaggadodharana” on her return, one of her signature songs.

Goli turns on her. “Have some regard for your poor mother. She is home alone. If we stay, we will surely miss the last bus. Thangam will be worried to death.” He turns to their hosts. “My wife is expecting, you know. And, of course, with the demands of my position, it really is not advisable.”

The husband makes weak clucking noises to insist upon their staying, while his wife goes to fetch the vermilion to offer Janaki in farewell. Janaki tries something else.

“But... my grandmother will be very angry if we don’t listen to the whole thing.”

Goli’s eyes, which always shine unfathomably, flash.

Janaki heedlessly continues, “Akka will be okay. She’s not expecting us until morning...”

“Stop calling her Akka. She’s your mother.” Chop, chop, chop, hand against palm. “Don’t you care for her at all? Why are you telling me what your grandmother wants? Am I not your father?” He flashes his eyes at their motionless hosts and his voice modulates into a soothing tone, somehow more frightening even than his explosion. “I know I told her we would be home in the morning.” He smiles at Janaki as she shrinks from him. “We’ll surprise her.”

The lady of the house holds the silver plate of hospitality out to Janaki. Janaki, fuming, applies a vermilion smudge to her forehead and accepts the betel leaf.

It is better that they return that night, and Janaki knows it but doesn’t know why he had earlier insisted they would not. This move to return the same night is not out of character: the only rule to Goli’s behaviour appears to be that he does not keep his word.

Janaki dozes on the way home, the betel leaf crunched in her fist. Vani’s music steams in her dreams and when she lifts her lids and looks through the metal shutters half-closed against the rain, she glimpses the silver moon, full and bright beyond thick clouds. The rains beat on the bus roof and become the mridangam in her dreams.

Soon enough, they arrive in Munnur and duck and dodge from tree to eave toward the tiny house. Lamps flicker in the windows. Goli says, “See? I told you she’d be waiting up for us. Good thing we...

But Janaki knows Thangam wasn’t expecting them until morning, and quickens her pace against the flutter of anxiety in her chest.

They bang on the door and look through the window. Thangam lies on a cot and one of the neighbours, who is with her, comes to open the locks. She tells us she was called by another neighbour when Thangam started vomiting early in the evening.

The lamps’ golden glow cools and condenses as it reaches Thangam. Her brow is dewy. Father and daughter step across the threshold. Thangam opens her blue marble eyes, and Janaki’s fast-beating heart is in her mouth when her mother’s blue lips part: “If you had come in the morning, you would have beheld my dead body.”

“I can’t hold on any longer. I’m too tired.” She convulses, lips slack, eyelids small knots, nostrils flaring and closing.

Janaki runs to her side, calling out to her. “Akka, come back, Akka, my mother.” Janaki tries to smooth her brow, but life pulsates under Thangam’s skin, weighed down by lumps and bricks and dreams of gold, life held under the cold blue surface.

Goli pulls Janaki away and lays a finger on Thangam’s shoulder. Immediately Thangam is still, as though the impulses have withdrawn, the way the touch-me-not plant closes its leaves on contact. She is still, except for a decorous, defiant throb at wrist and neck, and another life, in her belly, which kicks to be free of her.

Goli demands, diagnostically, “Too tired? Too tired how?”

No response. Raghavan sleeps on a blanket, snug and dry between three spots where rain drips through the roof. Goli swivels toward the two neighbours and begins shouting at them.

“What’s going on? How long has she been sick like this?”

One tries to say what she knows, what she has seen, but Goli is pacing and muttering, every now and again returning to Thangam’s prone form to say her name, “Thangam! Thangam. Thangam?” until he begins to wind down, like a gramophone record. Finally, he, too, is still. Above and around them is the chaos of the crashing rain. Janaki watches her father. For the first time that she can recall, he is still and present.

He looks at Thangam, a long time, and then he begins to speak. “Thangam? You look so different, Thangam. When did you change? You were once so beautiful. This small house, it’s a mistake. My small salary, it is all the government bastards would give me. That’s why I was always trying to do more, Thangam, to get more money, so you could have a big house. A comfortable life. This is ... this is a mistake.”

He backs away from her, toward a far corner where he unrolls a mat, lies down and soon falls asleep.

One tear draws down from each of Thangam’s closed eyes. The rain begins to leak through the roof in a fourth place.

Janaki turns to one of the neighbours. “Mami, you must tell my grandmother. Please, my grandmother. She must come.”

Ifyou had come in the morning,
you would
have beheld my dead body.

Oh no.

“I need my grandmother, please.” Janaki gets the cash her grandmother gave her and holds it out. “Can someone go?”

The kind neighbours assure her, yes; one says she will send her grown son.

Janaki sits beside her mother through the night. She presses Thangam’s legs and arms, rubs warmth into them, until the chill breaks and fever burns through her brightly. Janaki soaks a cloth with rainwater and lays it across Thangam’s forehead, but the chill soon returns and Janaki resumes the rubbing. All the while, she speaks encouraging words. “Akka, you must hang on. Amma is coming. Amma is coming and everything will be fine, but you must hang on and see her.”

A leak springs above the dough village but Janaki makes no attempt to move her creatures, and from top to bottom they melt, sometimes in a slow bending, sometimes in a sudden collapse, until, as morning nears, the seven shelves are coated in a cold lava strung with puddlings of colour that were once red lips and emerald earrings, dark hair and cheery skirts.

An hour before dawn, the young man returns. He had gone to the next village and had a telegram sent—as quick as going himself, and less costly. Janaki knows her grandmother forbids telegrams for any but the worst news. She had forgotten to tell the young man. Anyway, this may not be the worst news, but it is close. He gives her the change.

In the morning, when her father rises, Janaki prepares coffee. She is a terrible cook, and her father makes a face as he swallows. Oh, well. She takes the second steaming tumbler, holds it beside her mother and blows the vapours toward her, hoping that miraculous scent of richness, vigour and future unexceptional mornings will rouse her. It doesn’t. Maybe the coffee is too weak; maybe Thangam is. Janaki keeps whispering in her mother’s ear, as she has all night, “Amma is coming, Akka. Amma is coming, just hold on.” She takes heart from the fact that Thangam has hung on, so far. Goli, saying nothing, goes to work.