The Toss of a Lemon (86 page)

In the film’s culminating scene, the brother gulls a corrupt Brahmin priest, castigating him in the voice of the goddess Parasakthi. When the hero reveals himself, it is to make a speech in classical Tamil, a language practically foreign to those in the land of its origins. The DMK is revitalizing it, making a gift to the masses of their own tongue.

The film is so popular that most audience members can now recite this curlicued speech, and the syllables thrum from them in the tents of the touring talkies, as they do from Shyama now. Janaki is just about to stop him—the children, who can’t understand, are restless, while she can’t bear any more polemic—when Baskaran comes in holding a letter and looking grave. He holds up a finger and Shyama stops speaking.

“Janaki.” He beckons her to come close and she disentangles herself from her daughter and rises. “We need to go to Madras. Your sister Sita is travelling there for surgery. It!’s”—he clears his throat—“cancer. I’m sorry. She will stay with your uncle Vairum and need help with the children, though of course we would want to go anyway, at least for a few days.”

They decide that they can go to Madras for ten days, so Thangajothi doesn’t miss more than a week at school. The girl is a top performer and Janaki is keenly interested in making sure she maintains her grades. She and Baskaran have not discussed it with anyone else, but Janaki wants to break with tradition in one critical way, and Baskaran supports her: their bright girl will go to college.

Janaki recalls having thought she noticed a black patch on Sita’s tongue last summer, but, with advancing age, patches and discolorations are not unusual. But it was, it turns out, malignant. Sita had gone to Madras for a biopsy some six months earlier, but treatments had failed to halt the spread of the cancer and now her tongue must be cut out in hopes of saving her.

Kamalam arrives in Madras a few days before Sita’s surgery; Janaki arrives the day of the procedure. Kamalam minds Sita’s elder children, girls of twelve and four, and seven-year-old twin boys, along with her own child and stepchildren, while Vani tends Sita’s babies, twin boys as well. When Janaki comes, she offers to help, over the clamouring jealousy of her own twins, with Sita’s babies, but Vani refuses. Janaki and Kamalam look at each other, remembering the Adyar Beach scene they witnessed on their first visit to Madras, all those years ago, and hope that Vani will be able to give the babies up when Sita recovers.

They also wonder whether Sivakami has been told. They’re almost certain Vairum would not have told her. As far as they know, he has not spoken a word to her since he sent her away. All of Thangam’s children have chosen to remain on good terms with him, and he has done nothing to discourage this but has made it clear he wants to hear nothing of his mother. Any time she is mentioned in his presence, he spits some disparaging remark, which wounds them so that they have all learned to avoid saying anything about their grandmother around him.

Janaki must return home but makes Kamalam promise that she will ask Sita, once she is stronger, whether Sivakami knows of the illness.

Janaki had framed that article about Bharati in creases, torn it out and stored it between the pages of a book of embroidery patterns, Stitches
and
Pictures, that Baskaran had given her in the early days of their marriage. She reread it several times in the weeks that followed.

Now, Clouds in the Eyes is coming to Pandiyoor. In contrast to
Parasakthi,
it has not been much of a hit and may be here only a few days. Janaki must act. She asks Baskaran to make arrangements for the next day.

Their bullock cart and driver are sent around to collect Shyama, his brothers and Baskaran’s nephews and nieces. Amarnath and Sundar are installed at a neighbour’s house and the paadasaalai cook will feed Baskaran’s parents. They set off for a tent in a field. The driver is a great film aficionado, and already unfortunately politicized—he has seen
Parasakthi
seven or eight times, Baskaran’s family servant Gopalan has reported, and Baskaran is considering sacking him before something happens. Tonight, though, he will enjoy some harmless entertainment.

As they walk down the centre aisle, people on both sides rise, a caterpillar undulation, men shucking shoes and lowering the flaps of their tucked-up dhotis, the few women hiding behind men and uncreasing a bit of sari to cover their shoulders. Baskaran puts his palms together, bowing to the sides, waving his hand in gentle slashes to tell the people to sit. The family has seats in the chair class, behind the benches and those who would be seated on the ground were they not now standing. Even in the costliest class, a number of people stand, shuffle and consolidate to ensure the Brahmins are seated together.

The movie is unmemorable yet will earn an entry in chronologies of significant works, owing to Bharati’s presence alone. She plays the role of an upper-class girl, kidnapped and forced into servitude by a villainous landowner angered at not having her hand for his son. The hero is her sweetheart, who mourns her disappearance with her parents in their home village. He imagines that she escapes her abductors but becomes lost in a forest. In his vision, she wanders, singing to keep up her spirits, melancholy at her plight but full of faith that God will save her. In a glade, she encounters a harp. As clouds part to light her, she leans her fair cheek against the curve of burnished wood and strokes out rounds of a tune Western audiences would have recognized as “Greensleeves.” The lover, wending his own melancholy way in search of a medicinal herb his aged parents asked for, hears her song and follows the notes to find her, the song from his lips joining hers while he is still out of sight. Her voice catches when she hears him, but when she pauses her song and darts futile glances into the woods from her large, kohl-rimmed eyes, his song stops. She trills a signal phrase that he answers; she sings a line or two that he echoes; the rest is easily imagined. The tented audience erupts.

Janaki went rigid with Bharati’s first scene and has stayed in a state of high nervousness throughout the film. She has never seen a film before, and this experience is sufficiently incomprehensible, but seeing Bharati makes her wish she had some privacy in which to sort out the muddle of her feelings.

Baskaran nudges his wife. “You know what? She looks like you,” he says and winks.

Janaki surges with rage against her old friend. It serves Bharati right, this destiny of performing in front of people one can’t even see. Cine-acting may as well be what Bharati was raised to do, though neither she nor her mother could have foreseen it. Bharati surely holds herself well apart from the descendants of obsolete theatre families who also drifted into this variant on their hereditary profession. They have all been cast out together by modernity, she thinks with vicious satisfaction.

Worse, Baskaran is right, though the resemblance, as far as Janaki can tell, is only in their features. She had never dared try to emulate Bharati’s gestures, such as the way she moves her eyebrows ironically and hands sincerely, making the viewer feel she is being falsely modest. After seeing how Bharati hunches protectively over the bowl of the veena as though it is a cradle, however, Janaki wants to try it, though she knows she would never do so with anyone else watching. She wonders if an opportunity will arise to tell Baskaran about her connection to Bharati and, if so, whether she’ll take it. But when they get home, they talk of other, more urgent, matters: Dhoraisamy’s health, which is, perhaps, failing, and the problem of a squatter on one of their plots of land.

The big news of this week, though, is that the creators of
Parasakthi
—who are touring the eastern part of this region still known as Madras to present to their fans, live and in person, the beloved speeches and songs from the movie—will arrive in Pandiyoor in a few days’ time.

A dais is erected in the largest town square and decorated in ribbon-works with the DMK logo—a stylized rising sun—winking from the centre of every pouf. That day, the town is overrun; the square overflows. Every cinema-goer within seventy miles of Pandiyoor has come for the show, except most Brahmins, who stay home.

From the women’s room, Janaki and Thangajothi make out the faint boom and echo of miked and undiluted Tamil together with the growing echo and boom of the audience, which spreads along the streets radiating south, east and west from the square so the gathering takes the form of an immense, palpitating DMK logo.

Thangajothi sits on the floor, playing at sorting her collections: tamarind seeds, cowries, pebbles, beads. Her lips move in exact accord with the speeches from the squares. With the first song, her brothers burst through the doorway, fists and hips punching in time, “Caw! Caw! Caw!” and scattering her precious objets. She screams and Janaki suggests they all move out into the main hall and try to disturb Senior Mami a bit less.

The doors to the anteroom and veranda are open, and Baskaran sits outside with his father. He had insisted, like all the Brahmin-quarter parents, that the children stay home from school today. Despite this, the quarter is unusually quiet, and seems even more so than it is in contrast with the noise at the square. Two rays of the rally stretch past the northern entrance of Single Street.

The applause and cheering has built for nearly three hours when it hits a sustained note, the sound of an effort to prevent something from ending. The celebrities must now be descending the dais, bodyguards sheltering them from their admirers. The stars make jocund attempts to sabotage the cordon, reaching across it to tap hands and clasp fingers. The bodyguards push puny, persistent peasants to the sides, creating a corridor for the stars, and then another for the cars, which begin slowly to pull away. The crowd is thousands deep—over half those present dance an escort for their departing heroes, and then depart after them, elated; others sit or walk away; yet another faction of some hundreds, farthest from the cars and closest to the Brahmin quarter, take their feelings to the streets.

Seeing the crowd approach, the Brahmin quarter rises from its verandas, goes inside its houses, closes its doors. Janaki glimpses the distorted faces of the impassioned oppressed, trying to renounce God and caste for a better life, as Baskaran ushers his father into the vestibule and slides the great upper and lower bolts into place. “Janaki, make sure the back gate and the back doors are all locked.”

Janaki hurries to follow his instructions and finds Gopalan already carrying them out, while Baskaran enters his father’s and mother’s redoubts to close and bolt the shutters inside the barred windows, and then does the same for all the high windows facing Single Street. Janaki finishes by shunting into place the upper and side bolts for the garden doors, where little Thangajothi is sliding their lower bolts down into the floor.

“I want you all to stay together down here, is that understood?” Baskaran looks at each of their faces in turn. “I am going up onto the roof to keep track of matters.”

“No,
pa,
please,” blurts Janaki.

“It’s all right.” He pats her hand and mounts the stairs. “They won’t even be able to see me, much less reach me, but I want to watch what they’re up to.”

When Baskaran looks down from the edge of the roof, the horde has rounded from Single Street on to Double Street, filling the empty road as they pour toward the Krishna temple. Three or four other men are on their roofs and they acknowledge one another without sign or sound, lords now serving as their own sentinels. Some in the massing throng carry flags or pennants; three badmashes hold aloft a giant portrait of Ganesha, wearing an insult, a garland of sandals, and some others, when they reach the temple, pelt it with their shoes. Baskaran thinks it is this that causes one Brahmin man at the end of the quarter to point, then make gestures as though signalling someone to go. Another joins him. Baskaran shares their outrage at the insults, but thinks, Surely they can’t believe these deranged
and
unthinking
semi-citizens
will pay
attention?
But now one of his neighbours is shouting west, and the others on their roofs are turning, and their message, relayed without distortion, reaches Baskaran.

“It’s Shyama. He’s in the crowd. Below.”

Baskaran is at his stairs and dashing down even before he comprehends what has happened.

Shyama is a hard child to pen. He had arrived at the Krishna temple from the side near the river in time to meet and be engulfed by the swarm. A young man with a bright face had mounted the temple platform and begun declaiming the atheistic speech. The crowd recited along, as did Shyama, bringing to bear all his own powers of oratory. The men around him smiled down at him, so young, so cute, so full of conviction. Then one of them noticed his holy thread and signalled to his mates by running the point of his finger and thumb from shoulder to hip and back—
Brahmin
—a gesture that stilled a small ring of men around him.

Shyama stops singing when a shoe hits him on the forehead. He looks around and finds he is surrounded by a half-dozen leering, jeering men, calling him names whose literal meaning he doesn’t understand. The men lift their dhotis in thrusting gestures of insult, for forty or fifty seconds, a long time for a child, before their fellows set upon them and slap them resoundingly. Shyama is picked up, patted and placed on the shoulders of a man who either finds it amusing to have a Brahmin mascot for this exercise or thinks this the safest place to put the child for the moment.

Raised above the crowd, Shyama is spotted by the last man on Double Street, but, absorbed again in the action of the rally, he doesn’t see the man shout and wave to him, then start to run.

When Gopalan sees his young master run shouting from the stairwell, he slips out the back, telling the cook he is summoning the police, who are circling but not interfering with the demonstration. At the front, Janaki bolts the door behind her husband as he has told her to, and presses her ear against it, sobbing silently so she can open it the instant he returns. Baskaran’s father opens his window a crack and sees his son set upon with blows and kicks on his own doorstep, as have been his two equally reckless neighbours along the road.