MUCHAMI HAS CARED FOR ALL of Thangam’s children with as much tenderness as their personalities and his station permitted, but he has never grown so attached to one as he has to Janaki in the months since she arrived. He tried with all of the children to distract them from their grief at losing their mother, tried to compensate with games and amusement for the affection Sivakami was unable to give them during the day. Only with Janaki, though, has he formed such a bond. She shines with a brighter light than her siblings, he often thinks, as she trots along beside him, helping with his chores and chattering.
Janaki considers the calves to be her special responsibility and helps especially by coaching the calves in comportment, telling them to stop licking the wall, for instance, where their craving for lime has worn a smudgy brick border into the whitewash. Muchami does the tending and milking. It’s a very particular procedure. A calf is unroped and led to his mother. He roughly butts and nudges her udders before he clamps on. After a few moments, he’s pulled off her belly and tied so that she can reach him but he can no longer reach the udders, and then she is milked while she licks her calf’s back and shoulders. The very young calves stay close by their mothers even after they are untied. They’re allowed more milk. But a slightly older calf, once untied, will dash straight to the water trough. The mother cow will look on for a few moments, then turn her face toward her feed. This calf is not really hers to mother, anyhow. He was born on someone else’s account.
When the milk is handed to Sivakami, that is Janaki’s cue to rouse her sleepy-faced siblings. She gleefully taps heads and shakes shoulders, saying officiously, “Hoi! Hoi, lazybones, what do you think this is, a hospital?” She has heard hospitals are places with cots where everyone stays in bed all day. “Get up!”
Each child sips a cup of boiled milk flavoured with sugar and the scents of cow and woodsmoke. Chores and baths follow and last urgent sums of homework. Janaki usually gets a piece of chalk and makes marks on the floor as her siblings do on their slates, her markings as incomprehensible to them as theirs are to her.
More important than any of these activities, though, is listening to Vani play. After Laddu and Sita have departed for school, Janaki creeps close to listen to her aunt. She’s not sure if Vani sees her; sometimes Vani smiles, but it’s a mysterious smile and could as easily be a response to a moment in the music or some fleeting sensation as to Janaki. From all around, from street and kitchen come the sounds of people working, talking, solving problems and creating new ones, but Vani responds to none of it. She is not startled by loud noises, not disturbed by shouting.
As Janaki listens, she pretends to tap out the beat structure, the taalam, of the song on her lap. She has seen knowledgeable listeners do this, tapping the front and back of their hands, and each of their fingers, in arcane and particular orders.
When Vani has finished playing in the morning, she eats her meal. Janaki eats hers at the same time, not least because Vani talks while she eats. She never talks at any other time, and even at this time, no one-except, now, Janaki-really listens. Sivakami comes in and out with food, but not appearing to pay attention to the daily discourse.
Vani’s method is to tell, on average, a different story each week, repeating it daily with small variations. She often draws from her childhood, telling tales of grandeur and aristocracy. Her uncles are lawyers and ministers; her father is rich. Their house in Pandiyoor is full of music, culture, the latest fashions in clothes, slang, comportment. Most of the time, since Vani doesn’t speak, it’s difficult to tell that she is the product of such a home, but when she does, the influences are obvious.
After a week or so, however, Vani will change the story-fundamentally, but not superficially: most of the details will remain the same, but the moral import or the conclusion will be entirely different, all the pleasant people might become rude and the mean ones heroic. Once, for instance, it was a story of how a wedding was almost stopped by a death; in the variant, the death was almost stopped by the wedding. After delivering this reversal, she stops telling that story, and goes on to another one.
Janaki is as often confused by Vani’s stories as by her music, but she never asks questions. She knows that questioning will get her nowhere with her aunt. She must find other ways.
As Janaki is currently the pre-school-age child in Sivakami’s house, she is looked after by Muchami for much of the day. After his morning chores and mid-morning meal, he goes to his own small house and neighbourhood. Janaki goes with him, as the youngest child in Sivakami’s care always has, and runs through dust and groves while he naps, gossips and has a cup of ragi porridge with his mother.
Sivakami’s grandchildren will each have a very different memory of his or her pre-school months in Muchami’s care. Saradha will remember organizing Muchami’s nieces and nephews into games whose rules they continually broke or forgot-deliberately, she felt. Visalam will remember the whole time as a series of unbelievably funny mishaps. Laddu will forget most things about this epoch, though he will retain the rudiments of gambling, acquired while practically losing his shirt to Muchami’s young nephews day after day. (Muchami made them return to him whatever they won.) Laddu will also never forget the most effective ways of tormenting chickens, though he will not remember having learned them. Sita will recall Muchami’s small relatives as snotty-nosed, insipid, illmannered, repulsive, his neighbourhood as offensive.
Janaki will forever regard this epoch as the happiest of her childhood. In the late morning, each day, Muchami finds her squatting in one of the garden doorways, listening to or thinking about Vani’s story. If the story is not finished, he waits; if it is, he whistles from the courtyard and Janaki comes trotting out to meet him. As they walk, they ask each other questions about things they see or have been thinking about.
“Janaki-baby, why is it that the dust of our Cholapatti roads is so red?” he might ask as they exit the Brahmin quarter, the big houses falling away, replaced by mud huts with thatched roofs.
“I don’t know,” Janaki might reply, trotting to keep up. “Do you think it’s because the sun stains it when it comes up in the morning?”
“Never thought of that.” Muchami squints penetratingly at a field-one of Sivakami’s tenants.
“Yeah, and the night stains it black, did you ever look?” Janaki is starting to pant.
“Ah, yes.” Muchami crouches so that she can put her arms around his neck and he can piggyback her the rest of the way.
“And, Muchami, what happens to notes of music when they disappear ?” she asks from his back.
“I can’t say I ever thought about it,” he admits. “Did you ever try following one?”
“I… don’t think so.” She wishes she could see his face-is he serious?
So they agreeably pass the journey, stopping if he has work he must do en route from her home to his, whereupon she is released to her recreation, and he to his rest. After an hour or so, she creeps into his hut and lies down beside him to take a nap herself. At the afternoon’s end, they make a return journey.
By then, Janaki’s siblings are returning from school, ravenous. They pluck tiny bananas from the stalk that always leans, drooling sap, in the pantry corner, the ripening bananas winding up it like stairs. Sivakami gives each child a cup of milk and a globe of thaingai maavu, coconut ground with palm sugar and lentil flour and formed into a ball with the adhesive of a little milk. Fortified, the children go about their business until nightfall.
Vani, who rests upstairs for some time after her morning meal, comes down to wash her face and comb her hair about the same time the children and Janaki return. She then has Muchami carry her veena up onto the roof, where Vairum has erected an awning for her, and there plays hot and vigorous afternoon ragas until the sun goes down.
While Vani conducts her afternoon session, Janaki sits in the chalky-smelling cool at the top of the stairwell. Sometimes she’s permitted to remain there, sometimes lured or forced away by other happenings in the house. This is the hour when Laddu has his tutorials, for example. If Vairum is tutoring him, Janaki stays away. She tried, once, to take part, but it didn’t go well.
Vairum and Laddu had been sitting down to work in the main hall, Vairum glaring dismissively at Laddu, who fidgeted nervously with his books and slate.
Vairum lobbed an opening, his mind clearly already on his tennis. “What’s news, Laddu? Fail any tests today?”
Janaki had already figured out that whatever school is, Laddu is not very good at it. The boy made no attempt to return the volley. Vairum served a few more, underhanded. “What if your parents never have another boy? You’ll have to support them all alone. You must feel very ashamed and frightened, being the first boy and not having a future. Well, there is always your grandmother’s money, and my help, of course.”
Janaki, listening to this from one of the doorways to the garden, felt a response was merited and looked to her older brother to see what he would say. Laddu scratched at a peeling patch on his slate. He didn’t even look worried, just dull and patient.
Janaki piped up. “Actually, Laddu Anna’s going to do a big job and be very rich.”
Vairum had started to laugh and Janaki felt encouraged.
“Laddu Anna’s pockets will be so full of gold,” she improvised, “that his shorts will always be falling down and his bum will show, but no one will laugh because they’ll all be sad because he’s so much richer than they are. Yep. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Vairum had laughed harder, then stopped on a single snort and fixed her with a look. “Oh, ho, is that how it will be? Good. Very glad to hear that.”
Janaki looked to her brother for approval.
“What nonsense is this?” Laddu snarled. “Get out of here before I beat you!”
He shoved her toward the garden while Vairum said to him in much the same tone, “And I want to see some sums before I beat them out of you, get it?”
The episode left a bad taste in Janaki’s mouth, and she treated herself to a mouthful of dirt from the garden. She passed Muchami, wrestling with a rogue plaintain tree. Pretending to examine the rose-bush, she scooped a rich, moist handful from among the roots and swallowed quickly, barely bothering to chew. Licking morsels of earth from her baby molars, she went from there to visit with the calves.
Janaki never tried to get near one of Vairum’s tutorial sessions again.
During Sanskrit lessons, however, Janaki sits with Muchami, in one of the garden doorways. The teacher sings out the slokas and she sings out her version of them-Laddu has told her she’s yelling gibberish, but she thinks she sounds pleasing and accurate. Muchami is far less assertive in his responses, and one would suppose Janaki’s high-volume participation wouldn’t help him, but he never objects to her presence and always compliments her afterward on the subtlety of her pronunciation. Sometimes Sanskrit even enters their midday to and fro.
“That last sloka, Janaki: how does it affect the meaning that it’s on an upward instead of a downward tilt, at the end?” he puzzles one day. “I keep wanting to do it downward.”
“I was thinking about the very same thing.” Janaki purses her lips. “It sounds more like birdsong the way it is.”
“Quite right and well put, but is that the point?” Muchami challenges, smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Janaki’s brow is furrowed. “We’ll have to ask Kesavan Master tomorrow.”
A few times, she really did try to ask Kesavan. That was another mistake. Kesavan is willing to put up with Janaki’s participation because her presence has injected Muchami with some greater degree of commitment, if no greater competence. But he’ll not stoop to ridiculing the ancient tongue because the granddaughter of the house sees it as a lark. After a couple of barked responses, Janaki learns quickly to confine her questioning-on Sanskrit, on nature, on anything, really-to Muchami, the only person in the household who sees her questions as worthwhile.
She has also learned to confine her questions to times and places when her elder sister Sita will not overhear her. It had happened once, that, in a good mood, Janaki had called out to Muchami as he ate his tiffin, “Muchami, when a bunch of stick insects get together, do they make a tree?”
Before Muchami could answer, Sita, walking past, had supplied a response. “Sure, the same tree your wooden head fell off of.”
Seeing Janaki absorbed in Vani’s music, Sita chitters from the bottom of the stairs or the pantry until Janaki can’t help but look.
“Janaki, this is you,” Sita says, and makes an expression like a monkey sunk, drunk, in a pile of rotting fruit, batting her hand idiotically against her knee.
While Janaki earnestly sits by Muchami’s side, singing out her phrases of “Sanskrit,” Sita parades past in the garden and yodels perfect imitations.
So now, when Sivakami tells Janaki she must come back early from Muchami’s because the tailor is coming to measure her for a school uniform, Sita clarifies, “Amma wants to make sure you have a uniform because then you’ll blend in even though you don’t know anything.”
“Blend in to what?” Janaki frowns.
“The rest of the know-nothing babies, what do you think?” Sita smiles her perverse smile and leaves for school.
“What happens at school, Muchami?” she asks that afternoon.
“Well, you know I’ve never got past the door, Janaki-baby,” he explains, “but I imagine it’s all the things you like, writing and reading and learning, only more and you can do it all day and all the other children are doing the same.”
That sounds all right. Janaki likes the idea of the uniform, also. And Muchami is making her a new slate.
She goes to tell the calves her news. From the cowshed, Janaki hears Sivakami talking to Vairum in the courtyard. Vairum is washing his hands at the well following his own morning meal.
“Have you given it any more thought, kanna?” asks Sivakami. “I think we must pledge another-”
“I never said we shouldn’t,” he cuts her off efficiently.
“I… okay, I’ll look up which is a good day.” Sivakami goes to take the almanac down from the ledge in the hall where it is kept, about six feet off the ground, so she must stand on a small stool to reach it. Janaki watches from the kitchen doorway.
“I want to do the puja at home, for our Ramar,” Vairum says, slowly now.
“Good, kanna.” Sivakami squints through the thick, wavy-paged book. “Next Friday is auspicious.” She spots Janaki. “That would also be a good day for Janaki to start school. Janaki-baby, we’ll do a puja for you to start school, next Friday.”
The tailor comes to take Janaki’s measurements. She starts to feel important.
Preparations begin for the puja. Supplies are bought for sweets, for example, and their manufacture begun.
The tailor returns to fit the uniform.
“Will I wear the uniform for my puja?” Janaki asks her grandmother.
“No, kanna, we do the puja for your uniform, your slate, your books, put it all in front of goddess Saraswati, right? Ask for her blessings so you will study well. You can wear your usual paavaadai, and then put on your uniform afterward.”
“Can I wear a silk paavaadai?”
“If you like, yes. You feel like wearing something special?”
“Yeah.”
Janaki was pretty sure she had heard her uncle and grandmother discussing a puja for the Ramar, not Saraswati. Things sometimes, often, change out of her hearing, hard as she tries to keep on top of all household developments. They must have decided it’s more appropriate to do the puja for Saraswati, the goddess of learning, all things considered. Yes, that must be it.
Friday morning arrives. As her grandmother returns from the Kaveri, Janaki awakens and informs Muchami she didn’t sleep a wink all night for excitement. She bathes and puts on a paavaadai, teal silk bordered in yellow. She hears her grandmother instructing Sita to bathe and dress, and reminding Vani, also, that today is the day of the puja. Vairum has gone to bathe at the river, something he does only on big occasions. This school matter is even bigger than she had realized, thinks Janaki. The uniform had been delivered the day before and is ready to be blessed, together with her slate, ink powder, writing stick and nib, paper, books and a new tiffin box engraved with her name, G. Janaki.
Sivakami sees her come in from her bath and asks, “All ready, Janaki? Come, the raahu kaalam, the inauspicious hour, has just ended and the good hours begun. Let us do your puja now, before the priest arrives.”
Janaki follows but doesn’t understand. “How can we do the puja before the priest comes and everyone is ready, Amma?”
“No, kanna.” Sivakami moves briskly into the hall. “Your puja, for school.”
Vairum is already before the gods, doing his regular morning prostrations and prayers, clothes and hair still wet from his bath.
Sivakami takes the brass plate on which Janaki’s small pile awaits, and dots a little vermilion powder on each item. Janaki shifts foot to foot, chewing on her lip, looking anxiously at the door where Sita has emerged from her bath. “Hurry up, Sita, my puja is starting.”
Sita slows down to a insolent saunter. “So?”
A look from Sivakami speeds her along.
Sivakami is lighting camphor and offering Janaki’s things along with flowers, sugar rock-candy, a coconut and a piece of turmeric. She prays to goddess Saraswati that Janaki will work hard, appreciate this great privilege and succeed. When they think the goddess has had enough time to grant them the blessing, the plate is set down and Janaki prostrates for the gods, her grandmother and uncle, and Sita, because she’s older than Janaki and happens to be present. From the gods, Janaki believes she receives benevolent approval. From her grandmother, she receives solid encouragement. Her uncle looks uninterested and skeptical but tells her to make the best of this and sounds like he expects to be obeyed. Sita lets Janaki get close before she whispers, “You’ll be a disaster.” She beams at her little sister, saccharine and malign.
Then Vani arrives to do her morning prayers, after which she sits and begins playing.
Laddu comes and sits to one side, morning-befuddled, but clean and dressed for a special occasion, and everyone else is clearly waiting for something more. Janaki sees Muchami in the garden and goes to the door. “My puja is over,” she tells him. “What is everyone waiting for?”
She spoke her question a little too loud. Everyone turns a puzzled look on her, except Sita, who hoots and cackles, “She thought everyone was dressing up because they were so excited that the little dimwit’s off to learn some learning!”
“Sita, stop that.” Sivakami turns toward the little girl. “We’re doing a puja for the Ramar, today, Kanna. Vairum Mama and Vani Mami are asking to be blessed with children. You forgot?”
Had Janaki known, she surely would not have forgotten. She has participated in many rituals already to this end and was especially enthusiastic about the one where Vani poured milk down snake holes.
A priest arrives as Janaki sulks in the garden door. The priest begins to set up the fire. He needs to start the puja within this hour and a quarter: one of the auspicious times that checkerboard the day. Sivakami bustles back and forth from the kitchen with things the priest needs as Vani plays on, more intensely and virtuosically than usual, though all Janaki can tell for sure is that it seems louder.
The priest does the preliminary incantations. Vairum comes and sits where he is directed to by the priest. Sita is sitting beside Laddu, looking disgusted. She whispers something to him and he shrinks like he’s been jabbed with a hot poker. Vani still plays. Janaki decides to go change into her uniform, but when she rises, Sivakami shakes her head. The priest looks at Sivakami and at Vairum; he’s done all he can do without Vani’s participation. They look back at him as though they don’t understand what he wants.
The priest turns to Vani but senses something about her that makes him unwilling to address her directly. So he casts another, more obviously plaintive glance at Vairum, who sighs and raises his eyebrows back. The priest points at the hourglass. They don’t have much time to get on with it. All the household watches with eyes narrowed as Vairum approaches the woman who should regard him as her lord.
As he crouches beside her, she gives no indication that she is aware of him. Finally, in a natural pause in the music, he says tentatively, “Ma?”
She launches passionately into the next movement of the improvisation, her left hand, above one gourd, strumming and plucking the melody, right hand, at the frets above the other gourd, stroking out the accompanying drone. Sita and Laddu break into vicious chuckles and don’t stop despite Vairum’s withering stare. Vairum flushes. He rises to standing, like a hawk poised in the air before a dive. Janaki, from her vantage point, sees his lips seal into a tiny knot.
Fwoosh-he stoops and catches Vani’s left wrist, arresting the melody.
Without breaking the drone sound, Vani’s right hand forms a fist and knocks him in the forehead. He falls, stunned, onto his bottom as he releases her wrist. She resumes her virtuosic swells. Now every eye in the room is open very wide, except Vairum’s, which are screwed shut. He keeps them that way as he rises and stumbles through Janaki’s doorway into the garden. She tucks her legs in so as not to trip him.
Only Janaki can see him as he leans his desecrated forehead against a young papaya tree. He stays that way for a very long time, while the notes climax and come to rest. Vani places her hands on her knees and takes one breath, staring at her instrument. Upon exhaling, she raises her head and her eyes come into focus. She gets up and seats herself in place for the puja. The priest awakens in a fluster from his own reverie, finds his place in the sloka book and begins to chant.
Vairum detaches himself from the lacy, leafy papaya tree and returns to the doorway. The sun is behind him and Janaki cannot see his face. He turns to take his place beside his wife. On his forehead is the deeply imprinted double X of the papaya trunk’s bark-a wavy diamond with a half reflection on each side. The hourglass runs out as they complete the puja for a child. The papaya skin diamond melts from his forehead, as his diamond-dark eyes, too, melted briefly into something soft and hurt.
As the auspicious time dribbles to an end, Janaki jumps up and runs off to change into her uniform before her grandmother can object.
Her white shirt and blue skirt are starched as stiff, it seems, as her books. The buttons of the shirt are at the back, so she has to ask Sita for help doing them up. Sita deliberately buttons her wrong; Sivakami notices and makes her do it again, and then squats in the kitchen with a brass pot of yogourt rice. The children seat themselves in a semicircle around her and she feeds them their breakfast, dropping a mouthful of the mixture into each of their palms in turn as they eat.
When they finish, they run to the well to wash their hands, rinse their mouths and gather their things. Muchami secures Janaki’s books in their strap as she picks up her slate, writing stick and ink, and they run for the door.
He lifts her onto the cart. “Janaki-baby, go to the centre, away from the edge.”
He points and then stands, twisting his shoulder towel around a finger as Janaki crawls to the centre, moving her things in two trips. As the cart lurches around the corner, she seats herself in a puff of relief, and then looks up to see Muchami watching her from the veranda. She suddenly realizes he needs to do all his regular things today: go to his home, take a nap-how is he going to do all that without her? She had gotten so excited about going to school that she hadn’t considered the fact that she wouldn’t be at home.
She tries to stand but stumbles on a couple of other children. The last sight she has of her home is Muchami gesturing impatiently and yelling, “Sit! Sit!”
Muchami enters the garden (he had run through the house to help Janaki but, as a matter of course, doesn’t walk through the main hall), walks through the cowshed and into the courtyard.
“I suppose I’ll get the marketing done, Amma,” he calls to Sivakami. “Anything particular I should look for?”
“No. Whatever’s good.” She doesn’t look up from preparing the mid-morning meal. He doesn’t go, however, but continues standing in the courtyard, half out of sight, beyond the kitchen door. Sivakami stands to dump out the water in which she has been rinsing okra, and sees him. “I said, whatever’s good.”
He looks at the ground. He doesn’t understand how Sivakami could not feel as he does, bereft, though the course of her day is relatively unaltered by Janaki’s departure.
“You know, Mari and I have talked, sometimes, about adopting a child,” he tells her.
She slices the okra against the blade, tossing it into a pan. “I think that’s a good idea. No one should be without a child.”
“I think, maybe a little girl.”
“A girl? Why would you do that?” She doesn’t think she has ever heard of anyone adopting a girl. Childless Brahmins generally adopt some poor relative’s son, so that they themselves will have a son to perform their death rites. Muchami’s community’s customs are unknown to her, though. She suspects they may not have annual death rites; they barely even observe time the same way as Brahmins.
“You’re right,” he says hastily, unwinding his shoulder towel yet again from his sweaty palm. “I don’t know. I’ll go to market now.”
Sivakami shrugs. She has no idea what’s on his mind, but expects either he will tell her, or she will guess, in good time.
At the entrance to the schoolyard, Sita jumps off the cart and walks toward the school without looking back. Janaki finally figures out a way to pile everything on her slate and balance it as she walks, but she has to stop every few steps to look up and check where Sita is going.
They enter the school, a long mud building with six classrooms, their doors opening directly onto the yard. At one end are three offices, occupied by the headmistress and some lesser functionaries. Their doors open onto a hallway that traverses the width of the school, and opens onto the schoolyard at either end. There are only sixty girls in the school, so the first-, second- and third-standard students are together. Sita and Janaki will be in the same class.
“Miss, this is Janaki, Miss, my sister,” Sita mumbles to the teacher for form’s sake as she crosses to deposit her tiffin box in the coolest corner of the room.
It’s then that Janaki notices she is without her own lunch. Did she leave it in the cart? But no, it took her two trips to move her things, one for books and pen, a second for slate and ink. It must still be in the kitchen, where her grandmother leaves Laddu’s and Sita’s lunches after packing them. But she cannot take any more time to think about it. Sita has already taken her seat on the floor among the other third-standard girls. Janaki pivots from one side to another on her heels, trying not to upset her little stack of supplies, unsure as to where she should go. The teacher, Miss Mathanghi, points her toward the opposite side of the room, where eleven girls of roughly Janaki’s size and level of uncertainty are sitting. They all started school this month; three are starting today.
Miss Mathanghi, an ancient and dour twenty-five, waits for the shuffling and gossip to peak. The last girls are just entering as she launches into the morning’s prayer, some twelve couplets from the Bhagavad-Gita, which she bellows line by line, and which the girls yell back. She does this once through with the entire classroom in some semblance of chorus. She then sings out each line a second time, looking at the ceiling or out the window. At the end of the line, she points to a student, who must repeat it alone. Sita is among the first; she gets perhaps half of her line right. That is typical for her, but today she has an additional distraction: she is smiling a calculating smile at her sister, implying that Janaki will be chosen and that she should be scared.
Janaki is scared. One of her standard-mates is selected, a little girl like her, who has only begun school that day. She just gapes at the teacher, who stares back a second before rolling her eyes and pointing to a second-standard. Janaki feels herself petrifying and turning red; perhaps, she thinks, perhaps she can blend into the brick floor. Perhaps the teacher will see only an empty space, an empty uniform starched stiff enough to stand alone.
But there is the pointer, aimed at Janaki.
And Janaki responds, repeating the entire line perfectly. Or so it sounds to her, but then it always does. But yes, it’s true: the teacher is nodding, surprised, approving. She sings out the next line and the next, the final line of the prayer. She indicates Janaki for both of them. Janaki repeats them. She looks cautiously at Sita, expecting her sister to be shaking in triumphant hilarity while Janaki makes a fool of herself, but Sita is gaping at her jealously and looks away when Janaki turns to her.
The first class of the day for the youngest girls is arithmetic; the first exercise is writing the numerals one through ten. The teacher props a slate near the front of the classroom and writes, “1, 2, 3.” “Those of you who can, copy this. Those of you who can‘t, well, then we will know you can’t!”
Janaki thinks she can do this. The first figure on the board looks like a walking stick, the next an ear, with a dangling earring blowing out in the wind, the last like a bird, tipped sideways to round a corner in flight. She thinks the teacher has been too hasty in making the drawings and does her best to make each figure more realistic and accurate.
If only she could stop the tears that keep blurring the image in front of her, the job would be much simpler. She can’t seem to stop herself from thinking about the calves and cows, who must be feeling lost without her there to instruct and reassure them. And Vani-will she even bother to change her story when no one at all is listening? Worst of all, Muchami is walking home alone. He’ll be leaving any time now, his head heavy with questions he can ask no one. Three tears plink onto her new slate and she wipes them off with her skirt quickly before anyone can see. But when she blinks, swallows and blinks again, the design she worked so hard to produce is also gone, and she has a smear of chalk on her navy blue skirt.
Meanwhile the teacher has given a reading assignment to the second-standards. The third-standard girls have been asked to write out multiplication tables.
“I’m so looking forward to reading Sita’s times table-three days ago she wrote all the figures so small no one but she could make them out. I’m sure they were all absolutely correct,” Miss Mathanghi says in a tone implying the opposite. Her face is grim as concrete.
Sita, already seeing red due to Janaki’s recent triumph, bends to her work with a grimness bordering on the teacher’s own. It’s not the only way she resembles the teacher. Sita has a talent for hurting people, but she has learned a lot in Miss Mathanghi’s classroom.
Miss Mathanghi is making her way back to the first-standard girls. She has a small waist and low hips behind which clings a flat bottom. Her skin is greyish and her shoulders so rounded that her trunklike arms give the impression of emerging more from the front than from the sides of her torso. She has taught these classes for eight years, more than long enough to know that, in this tender phase, she need do little more than look at the first-standards to set them aquiver with fear and self-consciousness. Janaki, though, is a harder nut. She is not, as most of her classmates are, fixed desperately on the teacher, searching her in vain for signs of approval or affection. She is weeping, which is common, but, despite the tears, seems fully absorbed in the scene she is elaborating on her slate.
Janaki’s slate shows a small flock of 3’s, headed by a fantastic bird of prey. She is sitting back from the slate so that her tears drop onto her skirt and don’t interfere.
Miss Mathangi chooses her approach instinctively. “You don’t turn the world, Janaki.”
The little girl sits up, as though the currents running between her brain and spinal cord have suddenly increased in voltage.
“Either you do as you please,” the teacher continues deliberately, “which is to say, the wrong thing, or you do what I have instructed you to do, that is, the same thing as every other girl in this classroom.”
It hadn’t occurred to Janaki to look at what the other girls were doing. Now she looks around. Most of the children have done a passable job. Janaki looks at the brief and unattractive marks on their slates, and the detailed, dramatic tableau on her own. She’s confused. She automatically looks to her sister. She knows, though she doesn’t realize it until she’s already turned her head, that she will see the usual cruel gloat. Even that, however, is reassuringly familiar at the moment.
But then a far more reassuring figure appears. Could it be? Muchami is silhouetted in the doorway. He stands and doesn’t say anything, just moves a little, side to side, to draw attention.
All the girls crane to see him, tipping forward onto the knees of their crossed legs, though not rising. Miss Mathanghi glances at him and asks, “What?”
He holds out his right hand, a string tied into a loop hooked across his palm. At the other end of the string dangles Janaki’s shiny new tiffin box.
“It’s Janaki’s lunch,” he explains gruffly and looks furtively into the classroom, searching for her face.
Janaki is frozen, fixed on him, but her eyes dart to her teacher and back.
“Mmh!” Miss Mathanghi grunts and jerks her head toward the door to indicate Janaki should go take her lunch.
Janaki slowly rises and goes to the door, uncertain of how she should take her lunch from him. Why is he carrying it like that? She holds her left hand out as if to take the string, but he holds the tiffin box up and frowns to indicate she’d better take hold of it. She carries the box to the lunch corner as Sita starts to laugh, and soon the whole classroom is in gales, hysterical from the tension of the classroom.
When Janaki sets the tiffin box down, Sita yells, “Touch the water, touch the water!”
There is a jug of water in the corner by the tiffin boxes, and Janaki tips it with her left hand so that she moistens the fingers of her right, a ceremonial washing of the hand polluted by contact with cooked rice. As she does so, she looks over to Muchami.
Who is not there.
She drops the neck of the jug but catches it by the lip before it falls too far. The girls who see this gasp and then start laughing again as Janaki runs out the door and after Muchami. She throws her arms around his legs and clasps her face to his hip, clinging with the strength of immature fruit to the stem. Muchami pries her off: fruit drops away when it’s ready, but unripe fruit can also be plucked and ripen on its own.
“Oh, Janaki-baby.” He stoops toward her. “Don’t you love school? What did you learn today?”
Janaki doesn’t answer. Her small body strains toward him so that the second his elbows relax, she sticks herself again to his leg.
“Have you had enough for today already?” He knows he probably shouldn’t even be asking, but he, too, had been wondering how he would get through his day without her. “Okay, just today. You can come with me.”
She lifts her arms to him and he picks her up and starts to walk, her arms around his neck, her face in his shoulder. He can feel her calming, or is that him?
Her face in his neck, she asks, “Muchami, why did you carry my food with the string-because of cooked-rice pollution?”
“Um, no, Janaki-baby,” he replies, feeling an unaccustomed sting of humiliation. “Because you are Brahmin and I cannot touch your food.”
Vairum had left already to look after business in Thiruchi when they noticed the forgotten tiffin box in the corner, and they were about to send for one of the layabout sons of one of the Brahmin quarter’s poorer families, but then Mari had proposed that, just as she used a stick to move the family’s clean laundry and detangle the girls’ hair, Muchami should be able to carry the food if there was some instrument intervening. Sivakami produced the twine.
Janaki raises her head. “How come you can carry me like this but not my food?”
“Because you can take a bath or change your clothes, but your food can’t? Or maybe because you would be uncomfortable if I tied you up with string?” he suggests.
“Yes,” Janaki smiles. “I’m too big for you to carry me that way.”
“That must be it,” he smiles back.
They return to the house. It’s still early; Muchami has not yet had his morning meal. Even before reaching the little temple halfway along the road into the Brahmin quarter, they can hear Vani’s music. She had resumed right after the puja. Does this mean the day has continued in Janaki’s absence? Or is it now picking up where she left off? She would have believed the latter, were it not for the seed of doubt Miss Mathanghi had so accurately sown.
Janaki and Muchami enter through the courtyard door. As he washes his hands and feet, Janaki changes her clothes as her grandmother instructed her to do whenever she returns from her outings with Muchami. If she were older, she would have to bathe.
When she emerges from the bathroom, Mari, serving Muchami his meal, yells, “Ayoh! Janaki?”
Janaki runs through the kitchen, past her grandmother, into the main hall and drops herself into her doorway niche. She is sore all over. The music surrounds her and she starts to relax.
Vani raises her left hand and beckons in the child’s direction. Janaki looks behind her to her right, into the garden, to her left, into the back of the hall, but she is the only one around. Vani looks directly at Janaki, something she’s never done, her pale face solemn, her eyes canny and expectant. She beckons once more.
Janaki leaves her niche and seats herself, facing Vani and slightly to her right. Vani strokes the drone strings, upward, with her right pinky, leaving the melody for a moment. As she does, she taps the front of her left hand on her lap. Then she taps the back, then the front again, and as she does, strokes the drone. Then again the front of the hand, with a drone stroke, and she counts off, pinky, ring, middle finger. She repeats: front of hand, back, front, back, front, pinky, ring, middle, with the drone struck each time she taps with the front of her hand, and Janaki understands: this is how you count off the rhythm.
As Vani resumes playing, continuing to stroke the drone with her pinky on the taalam’s downbeat, playing the melody with her ring and middle fingers and working the frets with her left hand, Janaki taps out the taalam.
“Adhi Taalam,” Vani names it for her with a smile, and Janaki is elated because she hears it and doesn’t have to pretend any more.
As she listens to the song, though, which has grown sleepy and tense, like the lull before an episode in a long-running quarrel, Janaki’s teacher’s words return to her. She blushes and happens to look to her right, where she sees Vairum standing on the spiral stairs leading down from his and Vani’s quarters. He is watching Janaki with a look she will never forget, though she won’t understand it for years: the remnants of that morning’s humiliation, scattered against years of disappointment.
Janaki circles with her hands the space her aunt and the veena inhabit and cracks her baby knuckles against her own temples-a customary gesture of affection. Vairum charges.
“All you children, all of you think you own this place, don’t you? This is your inheritance from your father-the belief that you have the right to a good life without working for it! How long did you last, a half-hour? The school uniform is a joke to you? This is not your veena! This is not your place! You do not decide, do you hear?”
Vairum advances six steps toward her with his speech and Janaki has to flee. She scoots back an equal distance on her bottom, then stumbles to her feet and backs away, around the veena and her aunt, both of whom continue as before. As her uncle reaches the spot where Janaki herself had been sitting, Janaki reaches the garden door. As Sivakami yells, “Stop! Stop, my son!” Janaki runs out into the green and embraces from behind the young papaya whose succour Vairum had taken earlier.
The earth in the pockets between the tree’s roots tempts her. With one hand still fast round the tree, Janaki flips into her mouth a lump of dirt the size of the thaingai maavu balls the children have for their after-school snack. The soil is crunchy and damply acrid, and contains a couple of jasmine petals. Its dark comfort spreads in her mouth. She sighs and leans her forehead on the tree, both arms clasped round it, its parasol of leaves nodding above. Despite having her forehead pressed to the tree, Janaki can see her grandmother approaching from the main hall and Muchami from the cowshed.
Sivakami says from the door, “Tch-tch, Janaki-baby. Vairum Mama didn’t mean what he said. He knows you are a good girl, a smart girl. But why are you home from school now? You were so excited to go.”
But Muchami reaches her, turns her small shoulders from the tree and puts his arms around her. Janaki knows Vairum meant every word of what he said and now she has learned something else on her first day of school: to be afraid of her uncle.
She starts to cry on Muchami’s shoulder and a dribble of black drool escapes the downpulled corner of her mouth and falls onto his bicep. He wipes it with his shoulder towel and frowns at its colour. “Ah, Janaki-baby,” he sighs. “How many times do you have to be told?”
Mari, who had joined them by now, choruses, “Ayoh! Dirty girl! So much good food you get in this house! Don’t eat dirt! Don’t, don’t eat dirt!”
Janaki’s sobs, which had been pulling at her small form with increasing intensity, cease with a great inward yank, as though a line around her has been pulled taut. She fixes on Mari a look of weariness. Mari, who means well, clamps shut her lips. Janaki whips around and vomits on the roots of the young papaya.
Muchami takes her by the hand and leads her to the courtyard, where he washes her face and tells her to rinse her mouth. Vani finishes playing in the meantime, and Muchami sends Janaki back inside to listen to the day’s story while he has his meal. This week, Vani has been telling the story of a mysterious reliquary that seemed always to appear during times of crisis in the family, and disappear when the crisis had passed. A box in the shape of a parrot, encrusted with a filigree of unidentifiable metals, it contained a rosewood bowl as big as half a hen’s egg, still bearing faint traces of some pearly unguent; two coins, the smaller with a stamp of fruits and the other of two figures entwined in erotic counterpoise; and a wooden statuette that offended everyone who saw it: a dog with vermilion stains that indicated it was an object of worship. No one could hold on to the box, and no one could agree on whether it was bringing or banishing the family’s episodes of ill fortune.
Janaki checks the vestibule and sees that Vairum’s shoes are gone: he’s out on rounds or wherever he goes. She sits across from Vani and sinks into the story as into a down-filled comforter, wondering where it will go today. In the last four tellings, the story has turned on Vani’s uncle noticing the reliquary, in a time when he had been asking many pointed questions and receiving no answers. His suspicions of some misfortune afoot had been confirmed by the parrot box’s appearance. Janaki wonders if the story will change today and hopes not. She’s in the mood for continuity.
Maybe Vani senses this, because the story stays the same, with only the smallest additions or subtractions of detail. When the story is done, Janaki looks over to see if Muchami is ready and waiting. He is, and the two of them set off for his home. En route, Janaki asks the questions she had prepared. Muchami has a couple of his own. They are quieter than usual. At Muchami’s house, Janaki falls promptly asleep and remains so for the entire afternoon. When she awakens, it is to find herself in Muchami’s arms, and half of the homeward journey completed.
Back at home, Laddu and Sita have already arrived. Janaki tenses for a barrage of Sita’s barbs, but Sivakami must have spoken to her because Sita says nothing.
An hour later, she and Muchami sit in their usual spot for the Sanskrit tutorial. Janaki sings out her responses with confidence and without expression, as though already taking for granted what the teacher notes with a congratulatory smile: she has had a breakthrough.
In a pause, while young Kesavan drills the other pupils in a phrase Janaki had gotten right the first time, Muchami leans over. “You are the smartest and the best, Janaki-baby.” She smiles, embarrassed, and butts her forehead into his shoulder.
The next morning, Janaki rises, as usual, well ahead of the other children, and commences her morning routine. When Sita and Laddu sit to do their homework, she sits with them, bent over the slate Sita brought home for her the day before.
Sita is too sleepy and grumpy to be properly cruel and so only asks, “Where’s your uniform, twerp?”
Janaki looks up from her slate as though irritated at the interruption and asks defiantly, “What do I need it for?”
“To go to school?” Sita yawns loudly.
“I went yesterday.” Janaki bends again to her slate.
Even Sita is given pause by this, though she recovers quickly. “What, you think you’re finished?”
“Yep. I’m needed here,” Janaki confides with a return of her old assurance. She understands now that she can’t be both at school and at home. People need to make choices in life; this is hers.
“Amma!” Sita bellows, and Sivakami comes running. “Amma, Janaki thinks she’s not going to school any more.”
“Janaki-baby, shouldn’t you put on your uniform?” Sivakami asks kindly, and all Janaki’s confidence deserts her.
She sits like a crumpled paper cut-out of herself. Sivakami doesn’t say more. She tells the children to come to breakfast. Janaki doesn’t come. The bullock cart arrives. Janaki stays in her hall-door niche. Vani invites her to beat the taalam on the final number. Janaki does- Vairum left on business early that morning, and she doesn’t need to worry about him.
Today Vani’s story changes: now the uncle is the one on the brink of misfortune and trying to keep it secret from the rest of the family, and the family guesses, from the reliquary’s appearance, that someone is hiding something, though not what or who.
And now Muchami is ready to depart and Janaki to depart with him.
On the road, she starts in with the day’s questions.
“Muchami, how come rice and lentils get soft when they’re cooked, but idlis and dosai get hard?” she asks in a let’-forget-the-past tone.
Muchami smiles at her sadly. “I don’t know, Janaki-baby. Maybe you should ask your teacher that one.”
Janaki slides him a wary look. “What teacher, Muchami?”
“Your teacher at school.” He looks at her and back at the road.
“I’m finished school, Muchami,” she explains. “It was spreading me too thin.”
“But you have so many questions, Janaki, that you and I can’t answer alone. We need your teacher.”
Janaki is silent, wondering how Muchami could be so wrong in his judgment.
“Janaki-baby.” Muchami clears his throat. “Did you learn Sanskrit in school?”
“No,” replies Janaki, and it’s the truth. She didn’t learn it, she discovered she already knew it. “You can’t learn Sanskrit at school, Muchami, that’s why Laddu Anna needs to learn it at home.”
“Laddu is being taught at home because he’s not learning in school, but he’s not learning at home, either,” Muchami points out, and a little of Janaki’s faith in him is restored. “But you could learn so much, Janaki-baby. Trust me: so much that you can’t learn at home, that I can’t learn unless you go and do it for me. Then you can teach me. Please go back to school, Janaki-baby. Do it for me.”
Janaki is starting to see his point of view in spite of herself. Her practical mind begins rearranging her days. She could look after the cows before and after school. She and Muchami, too, can convene at other times to do what they must do. And she only need attend school a half day on Saturday, and Sunday not at all.
But what about Vani? Vani cannot be rearranged. Well-if Janaki is to be Muchami’s eyes and ears at school, he can be hers at home. Janaki will spend as much time as ever she is able listening to Vani’s music; he cannot help her with that. But he can listen to and relate the day’s stories. If he promises this, she will go back to school.
He can offer this. “Done.”
Done.
Janaki returns to school the next day, opening some doors, closing others. Muchami and she save their questions for the end of the day and weekends, but there are more and more questions never asked and never answered, and eventually, more and more she doesn’t think to seek answers for.