JUST PRIOR TO THE DEEPAVALI HOLIDAYS, in his second year of college, Vairum is required to attend a wedding. He is the family delegate to such occasions, since his mother is a widow and not invited and his sister, though invited, would be dependent on her husband to bring her. If the wedding is too far away, he can generally make an excuse, but at least three or four times a year it happens that the connection or location is too close for him to avoid it.
In this case, one of those Samanthibakkam cousins closest to him in age is marrying a girl from Thiruchi, so Vairum has no means whatever of wriggling free. He spends such occasions in a contemptuous funk, a quartz isle in what he perceives as a sea of mental poverty and ambitionlessness, and must employ elaborate means to keep himself from slumping into a puttylike pile of boredom. When he was small, he used to say multiplication tables under his breath for the entire time, three or five or, once, seven days running. The longer his attendance at the wedding the larger the final figure. These days, he occupies himself with the formulas of borders and business that will make him a big man.
His entire gang of Samanthibakkam cousins is in attendance, and Vairum vaguely recollects a great enthusiasm and warmth he had for them when he was very young, but age and time have intruded, and a shyness grown. They speak, but they don’t really know what to speak about. He avoids his aunts and uncles, who, on greeting him, all made cracks about the fact that the cousin marrying is his coeval, and isn’t it time Vairum got hitched as well? Sivakami has been asking him about this for the last six months, and he has firmly curtailed her: he is focusing on his studies; he isn’t ready.
He has not talked to her about the extreme anxiety of the prospect of a girl-seeing, given the reaction of most people to his skin condition. He would prefer to put off even thinking about it.
He stands at the back of the hall, fingering the coin at his waist under his new woollen vest. The weather has just recently grown temperate enough for him to show it off. All at once, a hushed reverence falls upon the gathering, from front to back. From the front, a veena’s lambent notes flow forward to occupy the quiet. A young girl plays, looking as if she had been born between the two gourd-resonators, her left hand maintaining the drone with rhythmic strokes while her right hand plucks the melody from the strings.
This is a new trend and the assembly is stunned. Only two kinds of music have ever been heard at weddings. The first is the nadaswaram, a six-foot horn with an obscene, nasal sound, with the thavil, a double-sided drum whose hard surfaces are staccatoed by fingertips encased in strips of cloth hardened with rice paste. Musicians are low caste-Brahmins expect them to be heard but not seen. Detached, uninterested, they play a particular song for each phase of the ceremony, and in crucial moments make a huge tootling din so as to drown out any sneeze. Sneezes are very bad omens at weddings.
The other music appropriate to weddings is religious songs, wheezed at prescribed moments by revered matrons. They know all the words, though their thin voices often disagree on tune and timing.
But now here is Vani, a young Brahmin girl, playing “Vallabha Nayakasya,” the veena’s tones breathed deep with devotion and training. Worthy of Madras concert halls (some think but do not say “brothels”), this Vani sits before them in the midst of a provincial wedding. Vairum hears the scandalized whispers start with the mridangam’s downbeat, as Vani finishes a brief but confident aalapanai like a first few raindrops against glass.
“What is this spectacle-a girl playing a concert at a wedding?”
“I have heard about such things. My son’s wife’s people are from Madras city. They have been doing such… concerts, at weddings, since two years now.”
“Who is this girl?”
“Bride’s mother’s uncle’s daughter’s daughter.”
“Oh, yes, yes, the bride’s family does try to be far too fashionable. I knew it would not be the groom’s side arranging such things…”
“Pandiyoor girl?”
“Yes, pretty, isn’t she? Different, somehow.”
“Very fair, isn’t she?”
“That skin-almost, I don’t know, something different…”
Luminous. Vani’s light draws Vairum as a moth to a cool, white flame.
He goes home to Cholapatti for the Deepavali holidays. Sivakami brings him more snacks, in greater variety, than he would ever want to eat, and begins asking him a thousand questions about the wedding. It’s bad enough, he thinks, that he has to go and represent the family because his mother is a widow and disallowed. Should he also waste his brain-space remembering sari styles and hush-hushed gossip?
He cuts his mother off, rude but not unkind; she should know by now he doesn’t pay attention to those things. Sivakami quickly reins in her only greed, the greed for details. She can understand and almost sympathize with his lack of interest: she herself was far less interested in weddings when she was free to attend them.
But Vairum is speaking.
“… I have completed eighteen years, now, Amma. It’s time for me to marry.”
Sivakami smiles cautiously at what she thinks is a concession. She had said just these words to him on his previous visit, and he had vehemently denied every part of it then, even his age.
He nods and purses his lips, businesslike. “I will marry Vani, daughter of Parthasarathy of Pandiyoor.”
“You will… who?”
“She is the only reason for speaking of this idiotic wedding I attended,” Vairum answers, already heading for the stairs to his upper refuge, picking his college satchel up on the way.
She watches it banging against his bony hip as he disappears into the upper reaches.
“Who is she?” Sivakami calls after him, a note of exasperation in her question such as she rarely employs with him.
“The one I will marry,” he calls from above.
The next time Sivakami sees him-the next meal-she protests in gentle, persistent tones. “Vairum, kanna, a boy’s family never makes the first move. You should be thinking about your studies, now. The time will come soon, and I will initiate some proceedings…”
“Enough, Amma,” he responds, though she has numerous wheedlings still to deploy. “This is my decision.”
“You cannot make such a decision, you are just a boy!”
“Throughout history men have made such decisions,” he informs her. “Nowadays boys wait for their parents to present a girl or two and they say yes I will have her or I like this one better. I have already chosen and I will not have anyone else.”
“I will speak to your uncles,” she responds weakly, because she doesn’t really believe they will make any effort to change his mind. Perhaps, perhaps the girl will be suitable.
“Do what you need to do.” Vairum speaks as though to a minion. “Just make sure I am married to her. Soon.”
When did that awkward little boy gain such confidence, such command? Maybe in his classes, where his performance has been exceptional. Perhaps it is life on his own in the city which has toughened him. Or maybe it was that moment when he, standing before the stage, caught the eye of the beautiful musician and saw her miss a note and smile a little and look away shyly, and glance back.
That night, Sivakami lies awake. This girl, Vani. She might be fine.
Venketu, Sivakami’s second brother, could object. His daughter is seven or eight, and Vairum should be hers, by rights. But Venketu has been cool to Sivakami ever since she left their house. The youngest, Subbu, has been warmer, as if to compensate, but she thinks none of them realize what a bright future Vairum is going to have.
Barring serious objections, she expects she will give in to her son. Then all she will have to worry about is the family rejecting the blotches on his skin. Perhaps Minister will find some way to finesse that. On subjects of diplomacy, he seems inexhaustible.
She rises and exits the pantry, where she sleeps, to do her beading by the moonlight in the main hall, conscious of Vairum’s breathing on the mat beside the northernmost pillar. He chose to sleep downstairs this first evening-a gesture of tenderness toward his mother? She wants to think so. The slight sound of his breath fills the room.
By discreet means, Sivakami issues a request for information.
Her mole returns from Pandiyoor: Kantha, a hustle-bustle busy-body whose nine yards of sari, given mid-region spread, suggest a spindle bundled with bright thread. Her tongue pricks like a spindle, too. She enters already wailing, “Oohh, Sivakami, Sivakami, it is all too unfortunate.”
Sivakami bids her sit and offers a tumbler of water on a tray, the minimal mark of hospitality. She asks,“What have you learned?”
Kantha pours the water down her throat, head craned back to receive the stream, completely still but for a pulse in her neck like the gills of a shark. She fixes Sivakami with a beady, knowing eye, then her face softens into a well-practised expression between pity and conspiracy.
“Such a beautiful girl,” Kantha begins in an ominous tone. “So accomplished.”
Sivakami cuts to the chase. “She is married already?”
“Oh, don’t they wish,” Kantha says as though the words are delicious. She wants to draw this out.
“They have unfounded provincial superstitions about skin conditions.”
The phrase “provincial superstitions” sounds stiff and unfamiliar, especially pronounced by one so provincial and superstitious as Sivakami, but Kantha looks interested at the possible bonus of learning more about Vairum’s troubles. She shakes her head slowly.
“I doubt it-they are hopelessly sophisticated. Practically foreign! But surely your son…”
“So what’s the trouble?” Sivakami cuts her off.
“Her horoscope is very bad.” Kantha pauses to measure Sivakami’s reaction while Sivakami works to keep her face neutral. “Very bad. It says… she will not have children, and only a very small minority of configurations could counter this. How is your son’s horoscope?”
“Don’t know,” Sivakami replies, after a significant pause, in a mechanistic murmur noted and filed by the spindle, who knows fully well the rumours about the causes of Sivakami’s widowhood.
“There’s not much chance of a match, sadly,” Kantha continues.
“Sadly for them, too: her parents are getting desperate. Two years now they have been searching.”
Sivakami tries to stay all business. “Is there anything else? They are a modern family-does the girl travel well escorted?”
“Oh, yes,” Kantha yawns. “They are all too interested in their arts-shmarts, but this girl is their precious gem. No chances taken, I’m glad to say.” She’s not glad.
“And how do they feel about horoscopes?” Sivakami asks with deliberate coolness. “Are they looking for a boy whose horoscope will counter hers?”
“But it is so rare, Sivakami Akka!” Kantha is authoritative, encouraging. “They have been searching for years! And these modern people, aristocrats-they probably don’t even follow the horoscopes. They just did it because how else to find a groom?”
When Sivakami closes the door behind Kantha, she paces the length of the main hall, feeling her cracked heels grind against the brick tiles. She is sure she can smell the sandalwood box, tucked within the safe. She can smell it from the farthest end of the hall. She doesn’t want to touch it.
It comes to her: she doesn’t have to. Vairum has made up his mind, and nothing about the horoscope will change it.
A responsible parent, though, would try to dissuade him.
“Little one,” she starts when he returns from the fields. “There is bad news on the marriage front.”
“What?” Vairum is clearly not interested in hearing objections.
“She cannot have children.”
“She is only ten years old, of course she cannot have children.”
“Don’t be obscene.” She purses her lips primly. “Her horoscope? They have been searching for a groom for two years and have found none to accept her.”
“Pah! No one believes in that stuff any more. You know what I think of horoscopes? This!” Vairum mimes setting a fire and watching it blaze. “Superstition! Folk tales and false science!”
Sivakami imagines firelight on his face and suddenly the image shifts so she is remembering him as a baby, standing by his father’s funeral pyre. Vairum had, as instructed, tossed a burning faggot onto the dried cow dung patties and was pulled back by his relatives as the fire licked through the layers of wood and warmed his father’s corpse. Had he know what he was doing? Sivakami wonders. She recalls that he was crying. Does he remember?
His horoscope consigned his father to flames, and now he’d like to set his horoscope similarly ablaze.
She says weakly, “You must have children.”
“We will have children! We will have ten children! You will see.
Horoscopes are nothing. Less than nothing. Ashes of something long dead.“ He blows imaginary ashes from his palm and dusts his hands one against the other. ”It’s a new century, Amma, science and religion have triumphed over astrology and superstition. Come. Let’s ask God.“
The next day, Sivakami and Vairum mount the hill to the Rathnagirishwarar temple. The rains have come, as they generally do around this time of year, and they use banana leaves to cover their plate of offerings-coconuts, bananas, betel, yellow and pink flowers, camphor, turmeric, cash-and two paper packets. One packet contains a small red rose and the other a large white jasmine. They are roughly the same size, indistinguishable one from another, as impartial and innocuous as most instruments of fate-lemons, for instance.
Red is auspicious, the colour of vermilion powder and wedding saris. If Vairum chooses this flower, the wedding will proceed. White is the colour of death and if he selects this flower, plans for a wedding with Vani will quietly die.
The middle-aged priest takes the plate and, without ever looking at them directly, asks brusquely their reason for coming. He gives the coconut to a junior priest who uses an iron blade set in the floor by the sanctum to cut off its fibrous hair and break it open. The older priest lights the camphor and fussily rearranges the things on the plate. He waves the plate around, muttering, professionally bad-tempered, stuffs the yellow and pink blossoms into a few niches around the bottom of the lingam, takes half the coconut, some bananas and the money, and hands back the plate. The younger priest smiles at them.
Sivakami receives the plate and nods to Vairum. His hand hovers. He chooses one packet. He untucks the first fold and unfolds the next.
Red.
The rose petals rise, freed from the paper wrapping, like a ruffled sigh.
They return home in the rain, a triumphant smile across Vairum’s face, and a resigned one on Sivakami’s.
Sivakami makes a few well-placed remarks, speaking within the hearing of others as well as encouraging Gayatri to pass along information. There is nothing wrong with Vairum’s horoscope-she makes that clear-they are simply not interested in horoscopes. Others have said such things, progressives, people like that. Vairum is in college, it is believable that he might feel this way. He cut off his kudumi last year in favour of a Western style; he looks like a modern thinker. Sivakami had been dismayed, but it is not unknown, these days. She emphasizes her son’s impeccable lineage, his stellar future. Not the future determined by the stars, but his likeliness to be a star in the future. He will be a leader of Brahmins. He will earn cash, not paddy. A good boy, from a good family.
Gossip takes its course. Soon, they receive an invitation, almost identical to the one Sivakami’s father sent Hanumarathnam a lifetime ago. Originality is praised in very few areas of life. In the matter of a wedding, it is nearly unthinkable.
Vairum attends the appointment with Sivakami’s eldest and youngest brothers. At the girl-seeing, Vani’s family plays her to advantage. She is exceptionally beautiful and Vairum is even more captivated. Vani smiles at him-without shyness or apparent distaste at his progressive bleaching-and seals the pact.
And look at this coincidence: when Vairum enters Vani’s house for the girl-seeing ceremony, he is greeted by the two young barristers he met on the train to Thiruchi when first he left home for college. They are Vani’s own uncles! It must be fate’s working, all jollily agree.
The girl’s parents are plainly thrilled. Sivakami’s brothers enjoy the food Vani serves and the song she plays. They give broad hints that everything is satisfactory, but they really don’t much care. Returning to Cholapatti, they put on concerned and condescending airs as they advise Sivakami to go ahead. She perceives that they are being cavalier, but this was expected. Vairum floats in, dreamy, blissful. This is more significant. He has been pleased. His sharp edges are momentarily cloaked in cloud, but just as fog vanishes under heat, so any objections from his mother would unsheathe his will.
Eight months later, Vairum and Vani are married.
SO LOOK AT VAIRUM, a college student, married to the girl who will become the woman of his dreams. At first glance, it would seem he is becoming exactly what his mother intended when she tore him from Samanthibakkam and reinstalled him in Cholapatti, sacrificing his happiness on his behalf. If he had known what he would receive in return for his suffering, would he himself have placed his contentment on the altar? None of us will ever know.
He lives in the carapace of a happy young man. He has routines that build on his interests and skills, that give his life the appearance of balance. At college, he works hard and is rewarded with knowledge, honours and respect. He has friends.
One of those boys is distantly related to two wealthy merchant families in Cholapatti and goes there for weekends from time to time, since his own family lives in Thanjavur, a bit far to travel for such a short break. When his friend visits, Vairum is invited to be a fourth for tennis at the Kulithalai club and finds it a pleasant diversion at the end of a long day spent in studies and land management. He begins to frequent the club whenever he is home for the weekend, becoming a regular in singles and doubles within a rotating set of sons and fathers of the landed classes. Often he stops on the way home for a lemon soda with a few of them, though never with the Brahmins.
Why not with the Brahmins? Sivakami wonders. Is he shunning his own caste or are they shunning him or is it something buried, less specific, which neither he nor the group would admit? Vairum doesn’t feel he needs to admit anything, he simply has never had friends among the Cholapatti Brahmins, and age and distance are not changing this.
Distance is begetting distance, in fact-Vairum is tethered to the village, as they all are, by his land and history. The difference is that he is shod for a great step out into the world. The barbs are beginning to fly, and from this distance, they look a lot like the stones that hailed upon him as a child in his glass house. But now his carapace of contentment is formed, and hail what may, he can retreat within it.