THANGAM HAS BEEN EXPECTED in Cholapatti for nearly a week now, and Janaki, for one, is tired of waiting.
“Is she coming today?” she asks Sivakami, as she has every morning since they were told to prepare for the visit and the arrival of a new baby. Their elder sister, Saradha, arrived a week ago, for the same reason-she is due in a couple of months-but she is bossy and Janaki, who has never lived with her, finds her a little hard to take. She longs to see her mother again.
Sivakami tells her wearily, as every morning, that she can’t say for sure.
“Why can’t you say for sure, Amma?” Janaki whines, while her siblings scramble to organize their school work. She always has hers ready the night before. She’s eight now and can barely remember living with her parents but still aches for her mother at times.
“Because your father is a ne‘er-do-well and a cad,” Vairum remarks casually as he passes her and breaks a couple of bananas off the stalk leaning in the pantry.
Janaki shrinks back against the main hall wall to let him pass back out. She watches him leave through the front door.
“What does that mean, Amma?” she asks Sivakami, her lower lip trembling.
“Nothing, kanna, nothing,” Sivakami clucks. Janaki keeps her head down, her hands folded in front of her. “Your father’s work keeps him very busy. He can’t easily get away when he wants.”
Muchami overhears this exchange from the courtyard but is not close enough to participate. He watches Janaki turn away, oh, my girl, too old now for him to take in his arms. As badly as she clearly needs to be held, there is no one now for that.
It’s lunchtime at school, and Janaki and her friend and benchmate Bharati go to pick up their tiffin boxes. “So has your amma come yet?”
Janaki momentarily can’t think of what her friend means. “Amma?” Then she realizes: Bharati is referring to Thangam. She’s not Brahmin and so has never been inside their home. She can’t know they call their grandmother Amma and refer to their mother as Akka. When Janaki was telling her friends that her mother was expected, she used the term “amma,” but as identification, not appellation. “Um, no. Probably today.”
“I thought she was coming a couple of days ago.”
“My appa’s work means he can’t always bring her whenever he wants,” Janaki parrots, glad that Bharati’s gone on ahead of her out of the classroom and doesn’t appear to have heard.
They look to see where their little gang of friends are sitting in the schoolyard and head for a slightly different place to force the other girls to come and join them.
“I couldn’t live without my mother,” says Bharati.
Is she being sly? Tough to say: her eyes are downcast, toward her lunch, which Janaki notices contains chicken. Although Janaki still only vaguely understands caste distinctions, she has been inculcated with Brahmin disapproval of non-vegetarianism. Even if one’s caste permits such practices, she believes better individuals behave as much like Brahmins as possible. Muchami and Mari would never touch meat.
“I don’t really notice it,” Janaki lies.
Bharati lives with her mother, but, like Janaki, in her mother’s mother’s house. This is unusual, and they have talked a little about this strange fact of their lives they have in common against the world. She has heard it whispered, however, that Bharati might not know who her father is. Janaki doesn’t know how this works but figures the subject must be sensitive. Janaki doesn’t live with her father either, but at least she’s confident of his identity.
“Ayoh!” yells Bharati all at once. Only the newest girl of their set jumps, the others being more accustomed to her melodrama.
“What?” asks one of them finally.
“We have our music lessons with that horrible Nandu Vadyar today,” Bharati groans. Janaki can’t help noticing that even Bharati’s complaints sound musical and appealing. “Everything I learn about music I learn only from Vani Amma. Nandu Vadyar may as well be teaching us to wash dishes. Janaki, when Vani Amma was playing ‘Nannu palimpa’ last night, oh I thought I would cry.” Bharati leaps up and falls to her knees. Arms arching skyward, eyes softened, she holds the pose as though she is being painted. She’s so pretty, with fair skin and straight jet hair, that all the girls easily imagine her as an illustration in a storybook about the gods. “It was as though I could really see her, pleading with Lord Rama…” She clasps her hands at her breast and bows her head, while somehow still ensuring that her face is visible.
“Do you think when Nandu Vadyar hears music he’s hearing the same thing we are?” Janaki asks metaphysically.
“I don’t care what he hears.” Bharati resumes her lunch. “Anyway, that’s why I must have courage to listen to Vani Amma even after the sun goes down and the ghosts come out!”
Their four little friends jump and shiver as if on command. Janaki, because she is lieutenant and foil, and because she’s smarting from having had her question dismissed, remains icily still.
“I saw a ghost, Janaki, two days ago,” Bharati gasps, her eyes dancing, “when I came to hear Vani Amma play and Draupadi was late coming to get me. Can you guess where?”
“Tamarind tree, again?” Janaki assumes a diagnostic expression. “By the gate?”
“Have you seen the ghost that lives there?”
“Oh, there’s more than one,” Janaki world-wearily informs her. “Describe it.”
“Huge, skin of fire, dripping fangs, broken horns,” Bharati lists as though cataloguing the merits of a recent clothing purchase. All four of their friends are squirming, stricken.
“No, I haven’t seen that one,” Janaki admits with a tone of detached interest. “I think it almost got my brother once.”
“I shielded my eyes and ran.” Bharati mimes the tableau. “I could hear it chasing me until its power sucked it back into the tree.”
“But how can you bear to go back, Bharati?” One of their companions asks, reason and curiosity overtaking her fright.
“Because that’s the only place I can hear Vani Amma play,” Bharati harrumphs, adding dreamily, “I would overcome any fear, I would scale mountains and swim up waterfalls to live in her music.”
The whole rest of their class, munching lunches, looks frumpy and discontent in contrast with Bharati. Even Janaki, despite their close association, can never come close to matching her friend in style or mystery. Bharati seems to have been born sophisticated; there is something tragic that twinkles about her, something real or tinsel, one cannot tell, but it is intriguing either way.
On the bullock cart ride home, Janaki thinks on what may await her. She hopes her mother has arrived. She hopes her little sisters look like her, especially the one, Kamalam, who is coming to stay.
Vani normally commences playing shortly after the children get home. Today, though, as the bullock cart rounds off the town road onto the Brahmin-quarter approach, Janaki can already hear the music-vibrant, furious. Vani must be well into her session to have the raga at such a pitch.
The front hall, as always, is dim and cool, but the floor is shimmering with trails and patches of golden dust, as though a character from fairy stories has wandered through their home and enchanted it. The hair on Janaki’s neck stands up: her mother, loveliness itself, is seated against a pillar, smiling faintly. The contours of Thangam’s shoulders are accentuated by shadows of fairy dust, the pleats of her sari spread against her swollen belly. Kamalam, a little girl who does look like Janaki, leans against Thangam shyly. Another, littler girl, Radhai, is galloping to and fro in the garden with Muchami, banging trees with a stick.
Laddu, Sita and Janaki all grin and shuffle their feet in front of their mother.
“His.”
“His.”
“Hi,” they say.
“Kiss your mother,” Sivakami says loudly from the kitchen doorway, and the children go to Thangam, bending awkwardly to peck her on the cheek. She touches them lightly with her hand as they incline toward her. She smiles as if to put them off, and Sivakami, watching, feels pained. Has Thangam been made unable to show affection, too embarrassed by her father’s favouritism, and now by her fecundity? But why make the children suffer for that? thinks Sivakami. Vairum is not even home.
The children look at Sivakami as if to ask what to do next, and she beckons them to the pantry to receive their after-school snacks. Laddu and Sita sit against the wall in the main hall, Janaki in one of the doorways to the garden. Janaki expects to be asked questions, but she’s not. Sita and Laddu look proud and anxious to be noticed. Sita creeps gradually closer until she can take Thangam’s hand. Thangam lets her, without clasping the hand in return.
Saradha comes into the hall from the kitchen, bustling and bouncing, straightening things that don’t really need straightening. Janaki watches her and understands that, annoying as her methods are, this is her peculiar way of giving herself a feeling of stability. She listens, disturbed, to Vani’s music. It sounds mad this afternoon, twirling and popping like Deepavali fireworks off the roof above them. She thinks she recognizes “Jaggadodharana,” a song of praise for Lord Krishna, but each note is scissored frighteningly into sixteenths, blurring its sound. She hums along-yes, it is that song-and starts singing the lyrics, about the god born to a mortal, and his mother playing with him, as though he is merely her plump, silken baby, hers to hold, out of the world’s eye. Janaki first heard the song at a wedding a year earlier, and made a relative there teach her the words. Lord Krishna is humanity’s essence and its saviour, says the song, and his mother plays with him as though he is no more than her precious baby.
Then Vairum blurs through the pantry door and pulls up sharp at the sight of his sister and her mass of offspring, and Janaki suddenly remembers when Vani went away to have her baby and it died. Janaki has often thought about this cousin who vanished before she ever had the chance to meet him. It took her a while to understand that, unlike her and her sisters and brother, who have all been taken away and all eventually returned, this baby will never arrive here. She has always wondered what he looked like-crystal crossed with a moonbeam? A bubble on a cloud, attached to the world by dew-covered spider lines. They tore and he floated away. Had he come to live with them, he would have been Janaki’s special companion, her complement, she thinks. He would have seen light where she saw dark, he would have been Vani’s melody to Janaki’s taalam. She used to crave dirt; he might have licked whitewash from clean corners and she alone would know.
Vani hits and pulls furious strings. The melody hammers on the drone as Janaki’s imaginings plink glassily onto the brick floor and she drowses, half in sun, half in shade, her hand half-consciously tapping the song’s rhythm on her knee. She’s awakened by Sita knocking on her head.
“I’m going to go have a veena lesson like I always do at this time,” she remarks pointedly. “I’ll wake you up when it’s time for supper.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Janaki starts toward the back of the house. “Let me change, wait for me,” she calls over her shoulder as she runs.
At four o‘clock, as every Monday and Wednesday, she and Sita have a veena lesson at Gayatri’s house, with a terrible teacher of good family engaged by Gayatri’s mother-in-law. Gayatri had invited Sita and Janaki to participate since her daughter Akila was quite young and it would help to have older girls along, since she knew Janaki would like nothing better, and since she couldn’t invite Janaki without inviting Sita. Janaki ekes all she can from their teacher’s limited store of knowledge, while Sita, though she loves the idea of having lessons, is terrible and never practises. Still, Gayatri and Sivakami privately agreed that any constructive activity could help curb Sita’s destructive impulses, and Gayatri was glad to help Sivakami, much as she disliked having Sita in the house. Even if Sivakami had intended to give her granddaughters veena lessons, which she hadn’t, it would be impossible for the girls to receive a teacher at home, given that teachers generally teach in exactly the hours when Vani conducts her own afternoon session.
Sita will, of course, have left by the time Janaki gets out of her school uniform and into a regular paavaadai, and Janaki knows this, but changes quickly just in case. Sita has gone, so Janaki trots to the back door off the courtyard and leans out peering to her left, so she can see Bharati, who sits beneath a mango tree as she always does at this time.
“His.”
“His.”
Bharati points up in Vani’s direction with a mystified expression; Janaki purses her brows and shrugs in agreement. Bharati closes her eyes. Janaki goes to her veena lesson.
After he finishes with them, their teacher goes west, out of the Brahmin quarter, to the very edge of Cholapatti, to Bharati’s house, where he gives his last lesson of the day.
It’s midday break, at school the next day. Janaki and Bharati choose their position, and their friends close in uncertainly.
“I knew your amma had finally arrived,” Bharati opens, “because Nandu Vadyar showed up for my lesson with a gold stripe across his forehead.”
While Janaki and Sita had been at their lesson, Thangam had taken up her old position on the veranda, and Brahmin-quarter residents paid calls into the early evening. They would greet Thangam and, despite receiving little if any acknowledgement, would pinch stripes of gold dust off the veranda to apply to their foreheads and those of their loved ones.
“Yes.” Janaki smiles, wondering why she feels shy. “She was there when I got home, with my little sisters.”
“And she wants a boy, doesn’t she?” Bharati is poking at the contents of her lunch, which, Janaki notices with a little inward shudder, includes eggs. “Brahmins always want boys.”
Janaki doesn’t really know how to answer. Who doesn’t want boys?
Another of their friends, not Brahmin but close, blithely advises them, “My father wanted a girl by the time I was born. They had seven sons already.”
Bharati’s sneer startles them, though Janaki had noticed her gritting her teeth.
“My grandmother says all of your castes talktalktalk about how the good of the family is on the woman’s shoulders, how she is the strength and wealth and culture, but no one really believes that, they just want dowries, so they want son after stupid son. Pooh! My mother wanted girls and she has girls.”
They are too young to ask how it is that Bharati’s mother got girls just because she wanted them. Some people are lucky that way, after all: they get what they want. Bharati gives the impression that she too will be such a person.
“Oh, Janaki!” Bharati claps her hands.
“What?” Janaki asks with irritation. Why does Bharati so often make her feel as though she is losing? Aren’t they on the same team?
“It’s Sanskrit lesson, right after lunch,” Bharati says as though repeating herself. “We get to hear what happens next in Shakuntalam.”
Their friends try to look interested but not too interested: as regards Sanskrit, Bharati and Janaki are in a class by themselves. By themselves in a class of girls two years older, that is: they are sufficiently advanced that they take Sanskrit with the sixth-standard girls instead of with the fourth. In the advanced levels, the girls’ Sanskrit master is the same as the boys’, young Kesavan (not really so young any more, but he will be called “young Kesavan” until his death at the age of eighty-four). It is partly for this reason that Bharati and Janaki participate in the advanced class: each of them already receives home tutoring from Kesavan. Bharati has taken Sanskrit tutoring since she was four; her mother considers it part of a girl’s mandatory education. Janaki vaguely guesses this is some kind of a tradition in their caste but somehow feels shy to ask questions about it.
The fourth-standard girls are still at work on nouns, chanting them in singular, dual, plural, until, finally, the words become sounds without meaning. With the sixth-standards, Kesavan has taken it upon himself to introduce them to some classics of Hindu theatre, starting with Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam. The well-loved story of a hermit’s daughter, married in a secret ceremony to a king who later fails to recognize her owing to a curse, it is a challenge to the children, the vocabulary being sophisticated for the ten ten-year-olds, and the romantic intrigues even more so for the two eight-year-olds. Bharati alone seems alarmingly equal to both.
Rattling home in the bullock cart bound for the Brahmin quarter, Janaki reviews the Shakuntalam story episodes of that day, knowing they will form the better part of that afternoon’s tutorial. She had read the part of the jester, a Brahmin. She would have loved to play the star role, Shakuntala, but that had gone to Bharati, and Janaki had to admit she deserved it.
Janaki tries to remember her longest speech, in which the jester complains about his forest sojourn in the king’s company: “… drinking water from tepid streams fouled with dead leaves, eating badly cooked meat at odd hours…” Their teacher had shocked the class by saying this line showed that Brahmins likely once ate meat. One girl, taunted with this after school, had burst into tears and said it was a lie. Janaki thought she might be right. She has heard Sivakami and Muchami describe Kesavan pejoratively as a “progressive,” and so is skeptical of anything he says about caste.
In front of her-that is, behind the cart-a creature with strong legs and puny waving arms gallops out of the banana groves to the left. Janaki flushes as the creature giddily hurtles into the groves to the right. She sighs hard, once, through her nose.
A moment later, Muchami and Kamalam, in piggyback combo, bounce out of the groves again and gallop and weave up the road. Kamalam waves in a manner Janaki thinks is ridiculous, as she plans to inform her sister as soon as they arrive home. For now she is limited to a dignified, reproving glare. Muchami and Kamalam both seem too exhilarated to notice Janaki’s expression, though the jolt and shudder of the cart would make focusing on Janaki difficult even for the soberest of persons. Janaki clenches her teeth, trying at minimum to keep her cheeks from infantile jiggling, but the cart hits an anthill and all its contents are flung about. By the time Janaki collects herself, Muchami and Kamalam have turned up the path behind the Brahmin-quarter houses.
She wonders if Muchami asked Kamalam any questions today, as he used to do with her, which thought slows her to a stop in the vestibule. Her chest feels tight, her face hot. She is close to tears, but Sita and Laddu shove her from behind and the three of them stumble into the main hall, where loud laughter clusters and breaks around them: their second sister, Visalam, has arrived-she is also expecting-escorted by an entourage of her relentlessly gay in-laws, all now momentarily incapacitated by the schoolchildren’s brief physical comedy.
Already, Kamalam is seated next to Visalam and is laughing. The rest of the party is looking at the door, but Kamalam stares at Visalam and her husband, and bursts into delighted gales whenever they do. Sivakami is beckoning the schoolchildren from the kitchen, but Janaki’s eyes are trained upon the treacherous Kamalam, who was to have been Janaki’s shadow, her admirer, her imitator, and instead is insinuating herself into all those places that are rightfully Janaki’s own. Sivakami calls Janaki by name but the child smoulders to her doorway niche with the intention of wasting away.
Ten minutes later, no one seems to have noticed her wasting. She keeps her face turned resolutely to the garden until she sees Muchami approaching from the cowshed, grinning broadly and toting his slate. Then she turns toward the hall to snub him.
Muchami sits on the ground behind her and asks, “Janaki-baby, where is your slate?” Normally, Janaki starts writing out the initial stanzas of the class in advance of Kesavan’s arrival, and Muchami copies from her. When Kesavan arrives, they are often already mid-chant. They rub out and start over with the class, but the advance exercises make them feel unified and athletic.
“By the door,” Janaki replies as though she can’t imagine why he’s asking.
If Muchami notices her tone, he doesn’t let on.
“Young Kesavan is arriving, listen.” He points into the hall with his chin.
Bursts of laughter issue from the hall. Kesavan nervously reciprocates. From the corner of her eye, Janaki watches the in-laws shift and roll apart with the motion of a flotilla.
“Tell Kamalam to fetch it for you,” Muchami suggests.
Janaki straightens.
“Kamalam!” she essays. “My slate.” She points to it.
Kamalam scuttles to the door in a single motion, more eagerness than grace. Delivering the slate, she awaits further instructions. Muchami indicates to Kamalam that she can sit. She does, cross-legged, not leaning against anything, but, like Muchami, facing Janaki expectantly.
“Kamalam-baby, you listen carefully to Janaki,” Muchami says. “This is Sanskrit and it’s not easy.”
Janaki reminds herself that, even if she’s less inclined to express it, her scorn for their earlier foolishness has in no way relaxed. For now, it’s a special flavouring-essence of contempt-in the sweet sense of superiority flowing from beneath her tongue.
She clears her throat and calls to mind the cadence of the day’s first syllables, but before she can mouth them, the hall is blustered once more by gales of laughter. Laddu’s tutoring fellows are sidling in. They get laughed at a lot, however, and so neither hang back nor show alarm. One is tall, one fat, one handsome, but people tend to think they look alike because they share the tentative and hopeful bewilderment of the bad student who will never improve.
Janaki looks to young Kesavan, expecting him to be irritated or self-conscious at being stuck in this tittering tableau, but he has spied an opportunity. As Laddu and his three fellows sink to the floor, Kesavan rises and addresses the mini-multitude.
“I am hoping the majority of you are comfortable with Sanskrit pronunciation,” he smiles eagerly and only wavers a little at the shouts of laughter he receives in response. It’s not clear whether these are self-mockery or affirmation, so he has no choice but to plunge on. “Since you all are here, I hope you will permit me to take advantage and have you recite, along with the children, some scenes from Shakuntalam.” Here he pauses to receive the hoped-for hoots. “I can tell you agree it is a splendid chance to help the young people of this house better appreciate this beloved play.”
He casts everyone in the room in a role. Janaki is awarded the role of Shakuntala. Sita and Visalam are her girl chums, Visalam’s husband the king, Laddu the jester, Muchami plays a charioteer and several minor hermits. Kesavan then begins to conduct them as though they are an orchestra. He sings out lines, and indicates individuals and clusters to echo him like woodwind or string sections coming in at the baton’s behest. This is the largest audience Janaki has ever had, and she brings all her skills of diction and dramatics to the part. She doesn’t look at Kamalam for the duration of the lesson but feels her sister’s gaze. Kamalam has found an ambition: to play second fiddle to Janaki’s first.
But if Janaki is first, what is Sita? Visalam is married and therefore Sita should be highest ranked in the household now. Was she hoping for the part Janaki had been given? Janaki, casting her eyes across the room, sees Sita’s eyes burning like a cat’s in a darkened corner.
By end of the second act, voices are flagging. Kesavan winds up the day’s session; the crowd wants to know where the story goes next, so he knows he’ll have his cast back the next day. Many of the younger relatives will stay a couple of days in Cholapatti and are likely to be around at tiffin times. He gives them a brief disquisition on the portion they’ve read and asks if anyone has questions. Janaki asks whether there is a written assignment, but Sivakami interrupts to say that young Kesavan has stayed much longer than his contracted period and should hurry home lest complete darkness overtake him on the road.
The lesson over, Janaki goes up the winding staircase to the roof to listen to Vani play. Kamalam creeps along behind her. Vani is playing “Jaggadodharana” again, just commencing a charanam, the improvisational segments that make up the last parts of a song in performance. The girls squat by the balustrade, under the awning’s shade. This is one of the strangest charanams Janaki has ever heard Vani play, though Janaki suspects that more than her still elementary musical education prevents her from understanding Vani’s playing. She descends the stairs to go out back of the house. Bharati comes there daily to sit beneath the old mango tree and listen to Vani play. Kamalam follows her sister.
Janaki exits from the cowshed to the courtyard and out the back of the house, and looks left to the mango tree roots. Bharati is not there. Janaki takes two steps out and squats to scan the forest’s lower reaches. Some bird whistles a two-note signal. Where is Bharati? She can’t have left yet. The bird signals again, from the same place, close to the mango tree, or in its branches.
“Hsst,” Janaki hears. “Janaki.”
Janaki trips over a set of margosa roots tangled across the path. Bharati’s hennaed feet are waving from a low branch of the mango tree. One of her silver anklets keeps catching on the red-orange border of her chartreuse paavaadai-her favourite colours, distinctive anywhere except in a mango tree, where they serve as camouflage.
“Was that you whistling?” Janaki peers up at her.
“Who did you think it was?” Bharati grins.
“Why are you up in the tree?” Janaki asks, sounding grouchier than she intends.
“I thought I would be able to make the song out better,” Bharati explains.
“Can you?” Janaki moves to the tree and looks up.
“No. Come up anyway. Is that your sister?”
“Yes, Kamalam.” Janaki points at the littler girl, who hangs back, nearer the house. “How do I get up there?”
“Jump and grab that branch there and swing your foot up. Come.” Bharati holds out a hand as though to help.
Janaki jumps for the branch and swings. She kicks her legs, which makes her swing harder, pedals her feet against the trunk, falls.
“Try again,” Bharati suggests.
“Come down if you can’t hear the song any better anyway.” Janaki sits, leaning against the trunk, and beckons her sister impatiently to join her.
A minute’s rustling later, Bharati drops from the tree in a pretty heap, thumping against the ground with a sound akin to mangoes falling on windy days, the promise of sweetness, even sweeter if bruised.
“I have a sister around your age,” Bharati says to Kamalam, who sits, knees to chest, on Janaki’s other side. “Maybe she’ll be in your class at school.”
“Isn’t Vani Mami’s playing so strange today?” Janaki shifts a little so Bharati’s view of Kamalam is obstructed.
Bharati shrugs. “No one plays like her, but other people have kids.”
Janaki doesn’t know what Bharati means but is not going to admit that in front of Kamalam.
That night Thangam goes into labour.
The next afternoon, Janaki is listening to Vani play, again “Jaggadhodarana,” with the strange improvisation, which has grown even wilder and more alien. And when the rips and hies of a newborn’s cry rise from the room below the stairs to join the notes bounding across the rooftop, Janaki hears: Vani’s version sobs. The song somehow remains intact-perhaps because the improvisation cycles back to the original raga-but a keening invades it, as if the song were a baby blanket impaled on a sword.
Abruptly, Vani ceases playing, takes up her instrument and carries it down the stairs to the chamber she and Vairum inhabit on the second story. Janaki and Kamalam edge along the balustrade. Janaki happens to glance east over the rail, into the witch’s yard next door, where the slapping of laundry against laundry stone had been providing percussive accompaniment to Vani’s music. Dharnakarna, the witch next door, is washing the clothes herself. It often happens that her servants quit. In the silence which seems extra silent now, the witch’s sister-in-law’s incessant obscene monologue crescendoes and recedes again within the witch’s kitchen. Dharnakarna doesn’t pause.
Janaki, her hand on Kamalam’s shoulder, arrives at the bottom of the stairs as Vairum blows in from his business, a cold front in a warm climate. The door to the birthing room is closed. He goes to the pantry entrance and sees that the kitchen is empty.
“Amma?” He calls out. “Amma!”
Sivakami answers from within the birthing room. “A boy! Finally, another boy.”
Vairum nods, walks toward the stairway, and pauses outside the birthing room.
“Congratulations, Thangam Akka!” Vairum calls out. “A second son, at last. Now you truly need worry about nothing. I could even kill your first son and you would still have another. Nice work. Your mind must now be so at ease.”
Laddu, who had just emerged from the pantry with two bananas in each hand and his mouth stretched to encompass a generously proportioned sphere of thaingai maavu, retreats again. Janaki and Kamalam look at him, terrified, but Vairum looks back a little too late to see his nephew, then turns to mount the stairs. Kamalam holds on to the back of Janaki’s shirt as they shuffle through the doorway and along the garden wall. Kamalam is crying, and Janaki looks at her sternly.
“Kamalam, Vairum Mama’s not going to do anything,” Janaki tells her little sister as they arrive at the cowshed, where Muchami is milking. “Muchami, Vairum Mama isn’t going to hurt Laddu Anna, is he?”
“No, no, no.” Muchami puts a hand on Kamalam’s head. “Vairum was just… he was just talking. Aren’t you glad to have a little brother?”
Kamalam nods, though she is still crying. Janaki doesn’t reply, ashamed of her anger at the uncle who shelters them. Muchami seats Kamalam where she can watch the milking, but Janaki goes out back through the courtyard door. Bharati drops out of the tree beside her.
“Did I hear a baby cry?” she inquires.
“Yeah. A boy.” Janaki scrapes up a handful of dirt, dry and pebbly.
“A boy, huh?” Bharati crosses her wrists elegantly over one knee. “Your amma must be happy.”
Janaki shrugs-she has never thought of her mother as happy.
“My mother is never happy when she has a boy baby,” Bharati says, tearing a long blade of grass into shreds. “And they don’t live, except for my one brother.” She drifts into silence, then sighs a quick breath and looks up. “It’s okay though because my mother really only wants girls.”
“My Vairum Mama and Vani Mami’s boy baby passed on, too.”
“But they wanted him. Trust me.” Bharati looks like she knows more than she should. “What did your cousin die of?”
They hear Sita in the courtyard. “Janaki? Janaki? Okay, I’ve looked for her. I’m leaving.”
Janaki gets up. “Veena lesson. See you tomorrow.”
What did her cousin die of? Maybe Muchami can tell her. She has the feeling talking about it might upset her grandmother.
The next day, Janaki finds Muchami as he milks the cows. Even if she is too big now to go with him to his village, she still likes to spend time with him when he does chores, helping a little when she can.
“Muchami?”
He looks at her briefly and back at his work. “What do you want, Janaki-baby?”
She strokes the cow’s flank-it’s the oldest and the most calm of the three.
“I was wondering, do you know… how my cousin died?”
Muchami looks at her again, pursing his brow. “Vairum’s son, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he says gently. “I don’t think there was a specific reason. It happens, unfortunately.”
Janaki nods.
“What makes you ask?” He finishes the milking and stands, holding his back.
“I was just thinking about it because someone I know, from school, told me all of her brothers died when they were babies, except one.”
“That must be very hard.”
“I suppose, except”-he question bursts forth, held against Janaki’s curiosity for so long-“my friend said that in her caste they only want girls! Have you ever heard of that?”
Muchami wags his head slowly.
“Why?” Janaki asks.
Muchami rubs his forehead. “There could be a few reasons. I’m not entirely sure.”
Janaki waits.
“Is that the girl I see out back sometimes?” he asks.
“Yes,” Janaki says. “She loves music. She comes to hear Vani Mami play.”
“I see.”
“She’s my best friend,” she confides, not that he would know what a privilege this is.
He doesn’t respond, and she feels a bit disgruntled: he might appreciate it just because she so clearly does. In silence, she helps him carry the milk in.
Ten days after Thangam’s delivery, Janaki and Sita are kept home from school to clean house and prepare for the baby’s eleventh-day naming ceremony. They spend the day bickering and being separated. Janaki manages to arrange her tasks so that she can listen to Vani’s morning session: she spends the time spinning wicks from cotton bolls and knotting jasmine blossoms, marigolds and roses into garlands with cotton twine.
Kamalam fills her day by doing whatever Janaki does, but less so: she spins more slowly, her wicks are thick and uneven, her garland knots loose. Today, she can do almost nothing, owing to tension: their father is expected. Kamalam has confessed to Janaki that she is afraid of Goli and wishes he weren’t coming. Janaki, who hasn’t seen him for a couple of years, recalls some feeling of fear, though she is also curious.
Sivakami is preoccupied and apprehensive, as much in anticipation of Goli’s arrival as of his potential failure to arrive. Vairum will be unpleasant in either circumstance. Sita, who idolizes their father loudly and frequently (though never in Vairum’s presence), is menacingly sweet today.
When Vani’s morning session ends, Janaki winds up her garland weaving and reports for her next task-making murrukku, fried lentil-flour snacks. It’s a chore the children compete for, and she has won the first shift. She takes up the tumbler portion of the murrukku-squeezing mechanism, selects a metal disk punched with star-shaped holes and drops it into the tumbler’s bottom to form a sieve. She scoops batter from the basin where Sivakami has prepared it, and fills the tumbler, then takes the compressor, double-handled like the tumbler, and fits its end into the tumbler’s top. Kamalam, too young for anything involving hot oil, squats in the doorway to watch.
Janaki holds the contraption over the bubbling oil and starts to squeeze, twirling it slightly to make the descending parallel lines loop as they hit the oil. The syllable “ka,” appears, floating in the pot.
“Look, Kamalam, I’m writing your name!” Janaki makes a “ma,” “ a ”la, ” “ ”and an “im,” ” which bubble and bob in and out of sequence, becoming “mamkala” and “lakamma” as Kamalam, who cannot read, bends open-mouthed above the wok. Janaki fishes the now solid syllables from the oil, and lays them on a plate in sequence, then pulls the tumbler from the compressor and refills it.
“Make Sita,” says Kamalam, drawing closer and then back on a warning from Sivakami. Janaki does: the syllables “see” and “thaa,” “ ”sink and rise, gold against the black iron.
Muchami peeks in from the courtyard where he is washing up, and Janaki writes him into the pot. “Mu,” “chaa,” “mi”-but of course he cannot read Tamil.
“This is the last one, what should it be?” Janaki asks, scraping up the last of the batter under Sivakami’s frugal eyes.
“Amma,” Kamalam suggests. Sivakami smiles and turns away, though she keeps looking as Janaki spells “ah,” “im,” “maa,”
Janaki and Kamalam wash up and, with Vani, are served their late-morning meal. Kamalam appears fascinated with Vani’s stories, though Janaki is not convinced her sister is really following them. Today’s was particularly worth missing school for: the story of Vani’s father’s second cousin who was kidnapped by a renegade band of dacoits and made to serve them for twelve years as a laundryman and spiritual adviser. His thumbs were cut off so that he could not use their stolen muskets against them, and when he was returned home, he was never again permitted in the family’s sanctum sanctorum because clearly he had not prepared his own food in that time and indeed had taken up with a concubine, who not only cooked for him but fed him from her own hand.
After the morning meal, the household naps. After tiffin, while Sita makes murrukku with unusual willingness but no attention at all to shape or symmetry, Janaki is excused to listen to Vani play.
She slips out the back, swings herself up against the mango tree, bracing her toes into near invisible notches on the trunk and standing, then sitting, on a branch about eight feet off the ground. She mastered this about a week ago, practising one Sunday morning when Bharati was not around.
Bharati arrives soon after and climbs up as well. Janaki has taken the better branch-slightly wider and higher up. Bharati takes the second choice-lower and narrower. From above and to their right, Vani commences playing “Akshayalinga Sankarabaranam,” a song for Shiva.
Janaki and Bharati begin to tap out the rhythm-they have just recently deciphered it. It seems to be three and a half beats: a short and a long tap on the back of the hand, two long taps on the front.
And they are humming along. Occasionally, Bharati and Janaki find themselves humming different things, each anticipating a different turn in the song, just as happens with Vani’s stories. But, increasingly, they find that even when they hum different things, neither sounds wrong, because they are both improvising on the raga, though neither will learn its name and formal properties for some years. And they don’t sound bad together. So there they are, tapping and humming, their two pairs of feet dangling from the foliage. They can’t see the back door from the courtyard and so don’t see it open and Sita step out, hot and cranky from completing the coveted chore, blinking oil-smoke tears. She hears the two to her left, though she can’t see them. She says, “Oh, you two songbirds fill our neighbourhood with beauty. We’re so lucky! You must promise me, Bharati, that you will sing at my wedding. And Janaki, you must sing at my funeral. Promise?”
“Sita!” Sivakami’s voice comes from the courtyard. Sita wheels and whacks her elbow on the heavy wood door. “Not one more word like that!”
The songbirds stop their twittering. Sita slinks back inside like a mean pet cat in a family of dog lovers.
It is shortly after midnight by the time the preparations are complete. The moon has waxed full and burns candle-bright, so Vani does, too. Janaki listens to the last strains of Vani’s practice as she washes her face and hands, and Kamalam’s, in the moonlight by the well.
Vairum steps off the stairs into the main hall as Janaki and Kamalam lay down their sleeping mats. He speaks to Sivakami with a roughness that has increased with the years.
“Still hasn’t appeared?” It’s not a question. “What will we do if he hasn’t come by morning?”
Sivakami sighs. “We go ahead, even without him. We can use a stand-in, if necessary.”
“Makes sense. He uses a stand-in for every other function of fatherhood-except the original one, pardon me.”
Everyone else likes to sleep in the darker areas of the hall, but Janaki places her reed mat over a cold, striped mat of moonlight. Cold, milky moonlight pours in the window and runs over her face, along the grooves between her nostrils and cheek, collects in her collarbone, between her lips, in her cupped palm and the clench of her fist, and chills her finally to sleep.
The next day, the inauspicious period of raahu kaalam doesn’t end until 10:30, so everyone has plenty of time to rise and bathe and grow hungry-none will be permitted to eat cooked food until after the puja. Thangam and the baby take their first bath since the birth and Thangam applies turmeric paste to her skin. It makes an ordinary woman appear golden, but on Thangam’s arms and countenance it has a dulling effect. The baby is gently massaged with sesame oil, with special attention to shaping the features of his face.
From today, he will be called Krishnan, since he is the eighth child and a boy, just like the hero-child of myth. The name certainly fits, coo his sisters: just see his lusty yells, his kicking and writhing, his handsome face. He has all the strength and charm and mischief of the god. Clearly, he is more than equal to multi-headed sea serpents and poison-nippled wet nurses. Without doubt, he could steal butter and charm any village lady into forgiving him.
But just in case-and especially if all the admiration to which he will be subjected makes him vulnerable to the evil eye-baby Krishnan will receive today a black cord to be tied below his belly. On the cord, among a few other tiny trinkets, will hang a cup containing a snippet of his umbilical cord, and a bit of Laddu’s, the older brother who lived, sealed in with gold. Sivakami stubbornly overrode suggestions that the cup include a pinch of Thangam’s gold dust. She can’t believe that others persist in seeing Thangam’s dust as auspicious: to her it seems quite clear that Thangam sheds when she is at her lowest, that in some way, the dust is her essence, her promise, her vitality draining from her. It’s no wonder it has healing properties-she has no doubt about that-but it is not indicative of fulfillment or joy.
The puja is to commence in about ten minutes. Priest, mother and child are assembled, along with Rukmini and Murthy, Gayatri and Minister and their children, and assorted other neighbours. Even neighbours not present for the ceremony will attend the feast-it’s mostly of the feast that even those assembled are thinking. Fortunately, this ceremony is not a long one. The question, as always, is how to plug the conspicuous Goli-shaped hole. Thangam is releasing dust in volumes as though the stuff might fill the void, or, failing this, mask it. Rukmini, clumsy and helpful, gathers it into a dish. Vairum, looking disgusted, finally clears his throat with a snort and looks at Sivakami as though challenging her to make a decision. She takes a breath and turns to the priest, wondering what she will say.
She is spared. There is a commotion in the street, then the front door swings open and their hopes and fears are confirmed: Goli has finally arrived. Sita runs gleefully to greet him. “Appa, Appa, a new little brother!”
He speaks over the little girl’s head. “Hello, folks, hello!” His high, handsome brow and ruddy features shine as though he could make the sun sweat. “What’s all this?”
Sita trails behind him, a weak smile at the ready in case he should turn and see her.
“The eleventh day,” Sivakami responds. “The eleventh day after the birth…”
“What? Oh, I thought it was the… Wait until you-look what I brought! Son, you!” He is waving in Laddu’s general direction. “You come, help me.”
Laddu runs out willingly and they struggle back in with a large crate leaking straw. With a creak and tear of wood, Goli removes the top of the crate and digs through the stuffing.
“Catch!” he cries.
Luscious, exotic malgoa mangoes-Goli tosses them one by one by one by one over the austere, pious little hall. Shooting stars. The children run after them. The adults, bewildered, reach and jump on the spot. And starbursts: one, then another, explodes ripely against the clean brick floor. Visalam, eight and a half months pregnant, slips and falls in a mango slick.
A gasp goes up like a lost balloon, three more stars plop from the firmament and Gayatri rushes to aid the fallen girl. Visalam’s face is crumpled, as if she is about-to-sneeze-or-cry-then… “Ha, ha, ha, ha…” She rolls over laughing, and the others, tentatively, do too. Sivakami looks relieved, then severe. Vairum only looks severe. Thangam looks away. The priest has one eye on the hourglass, but he’s as up for a good laugh as anyone.
Now Goli is reaching inside his coat again, and pulling out… what now? Pens. Shiny, new pens, far beyond the reach of every day. These, too, he tosses in the air. “Catch, children, catch!” he cries. The pens turn and glint. Gold like Thangam and straight like arrows, they circle in the late-morning sun that seeps in through chinks.
Janaki is thrilled and aghast. Such opulence, such waste! There are mangoes ripening on the trees in the yard, not malgoas, which come from far away and are terribly expensive, but still, perfectly tasty, or maybe not perfectly, but good enough. And if they need pen and ink at school, they dip a nib tied to a twig into ink mixed from powder. What need could they have, mere children, for such luxuries? It has never occurred to her to want them. But as she looks at Sita, Janaki sees it has occurred to her sister. Sita has no real taste for either food or penmanship, but her look implies she could cultivate both, given food and pens that were worth her while.
Goli is lugging in yet another crate, pronouncing like a street huckster, “And for my bride Thangam, as beautiful as the day I married her, the gift of music!”
Thangam blushes fast and deep under her turmeric mask, and all the other women blush briefly for her, too-such inappropriate comments…
But what could this be? A wooden box with a brass crank like a shrugging arm. Goli affixes something like an enormous trumpet-blossom to its side. The guests gape, the puja forgotten, as Goli pulls two large black plates out of the packing with a flourish. “Stand back, friends, a little room please.”
He fits the disk onto the top of the box, turns the crank a dozen rotations, then lifts a lever from the box with a point he sets upon the record. Crackles, hisses and pops begin emerging from the great flower, but before the Brahmin-quarter denizens can start to fear the snakes or insects or whatever will follow, the hall is filled with music.
The good people of Cholapatti listen in astounded silence, motionless, until a few come forward cautiously to peer into the bloom’s private depths. Surely a thumb-sized musician must sit there amidst stamens and pistils, writhing snakes and whirring beetles. They pull back from the flower’s empty darkness to look, mystified, at Goli, who winks, raises his eyebrows, gestures toward the machine, offering no explanation. Thangam hangs back shyly. She doesn’t try, as the others do, to find the music’s source. She owns it, it is hers. Goli said it was. Here is proof, if anyone wants it: he does think of her. Sita stands proudly beside the contraption, policing the crowd.
The music is not nearly so impressive as Vani’s, but few of those assembled appreciate this. Janaki is among them, aware of how dull and uninspired the playing is, but she must admit that this does not diminish the thrill. The player’s absence gives her an appeal beyond Vani’s reach. Oh, listen! The song ended and the tiny musician said her name. Where is she? Maddening. Several advance again to try to see her, as Murthy begins pompously explaining how the technology works.
Janaki looks at her aunt, who had finished her playing amidst the final puja preparations. Is Vani hurt at all the attention being given to a mediocre musician who is not even here? Most villagers don’t appreciate her playing anyway, and since her melancholic phase began some weeks back, a few have actually complained. Her recent improvisations remind a person so strongly of old grief, it’s been hard to get things done. Fights have broken out. Perhaps the appeal of the absent Madras musician’s mechanical recital is increased by the villagers’ recent feeling of estrangement from Vani.
Though she appears to be paying attention to the new music, Vani doesn’t look in the direction of the gramophone or the crowd. As the record ends, Vani sweeps the room with a glance, her eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. Janaki, too, is caught in her net of disdain-the only person to notice it, the least deserving. Vani goes upstairs.
Everyone else is clamouring for the invisible musician’s return, and Goli lifts the needle to the start of the record once more. Amidst the bustle and buzz now comes Vairum’s voice, coldly inquiring whether they shouldn’t think of commencing the puja, given that the hour ticks down.
All jump to. Goli must be instructed twice in each task and always looks as though he is about to break in and say something. Sometimes he does, comments neither amusing nor relevant, but everyone laughs and pays attention. When he sees his new son, he picks him up and swings him, making the baby shriek with justifiable fear.
“He loves it!” cries Goli. “Listen to those lungs!”
Then, distracted by some new thought, he hands Krishnan back to Thangam and doesn’t seek his son again. Janaki, who had leapt forward in alarm when her father swung the baby in the air, sinks down beside her mother. Kamalam is already huddled there. She was a little too excited to feel afraid until that moment, and impressed by all the show, but now she is shaking a little. Was their father this careless with all of them?
Janaki leans on her mother, who doesn’t respond. She feels a familiar whir of disappointment but no surprise. She had tried a couple of times, before her brother was born, to be affectionate with Thangam and found that her overtures were not reciprocated. The pain has begun to lessen, though, and she takes some comfort from the simple warmth of her side.
The puja soon ends and Sivakami begins insisting the male guests and children have lunch. No one would refuse, but they let themselves be pressed as a courtesy. Janaki sets banana leaves down in a row along each side of the main hall, and Sita follows her, holding in iddikki tongs the lip of a hot pot of semolina pudding, from which she deposits a blob on each leaf as the diners sit down. Kamalam begs to be allowed to serve also and follows her sisters with a vessel full of vadais.
One lunch guest begins polite conversation, asking, “How long have you leave, Goli?”
“Oh, my schedule is my own.” Goli slurps up the initial daub of sweet. “This is a business trip for me.”
“Revenue department business?” inquires another luncher. Some of these people tried for some years to extract what they are owed for undelivered deer’s heads.
“Ha!” Goli sprays three or four morsels of rice with sambar back toward his leaf. “I’d not make any money at all, if that’s all I did.”
“What kind of a salary does the department offer?” asks an anxious-browed man from several doors away. “My son plans to take the civil service exam next year. I told him to talk to you.”
“You wouldn’t believe. Thirty rupees monthly.”
“Oh, that’s… well, it’s a good salary, of course, but to feed a family of what, eight children…”
“No, no, absolutely unjust. Very difficult to make ends meet.” Goli signals for more rice, and rasam, the next course, and Janaki and Sita run out with serving dishes. He conveys a sense of constant motion above his meal, and despite talking more than anyone, also eats more and faster.
Janaki, serving Vairum, whose indignation is writ large on his face, wishes her appa would just keep his mouth shut. She knows her father has never tossed more than a few odd paisa toward his kids’ upbringing and she turns, blushing, away from her uncle’s rage.
Another neighbour inquires with hesitant interest, “Where are you stationed currently, Goli?”
“One has somewhat just transferred to Malapura. But I am maintaining strong interests in Salem. Salem!” Goli reinforces. The man, who heard the first time, nods. “That’s where everything is happening. Everything modern.”
“Oh, is that so?” another politely remarks while belching.
“Oh, yes,” huffs Goli. “Industries! Banking! Everything is there!”
“Ah…” several men nod.
“Yep.” Goli gobbles both desserts and calls for more, and yogourt rice. “That’s where my son here had better set up. Might even get him to do his college there first.”
“College?” someone chokes lightly-another of Goli’s unpaid creditors. Eyebrows rise in a ripple among the eaters: Goli’s son Krishnan is yet a possibility but Laddu’s poor school performance is no secret.
“Sure,” Goli finishes, and drinks water, a long stream poured down his throat from a tumbler, which Janaki waits to refill, twice, from a brass jug. He belches monstrously. “If he’s going to be an engineer, lawyer, medical doctor, he has to go to college-may as well be there!”
“Oh-ho, Athimbere,” Vairum growls, making the honorific, “elder sister’s husband,” sound sarcastic. Goli turns slowly to face his brother-in-law. “How’s your money situation? Problems?”
Sivakami is in the kitchen and doesn’t hear Vairum’s remark, but hears the main hall grow silent.
“Not at all, Vairum,” Goli smiles tightly. “I don’t know when things have gone as well. So many opportunities opening up. A person just has to know how to take advantage.”
“You certainly know how to take advantage, Athimbere,” Vairum spits. “That is definitely one of your strong suits.”
“I’m sure we all prefer not to know what you are talking about, Vairum, but what I am talking about”-Goli opens his face like a late-season sunflower to the rest of the company-“is investment. I’m sure there are many present who wouldn’t mind knowing how to improve fortunes grown paltry with time.”
“Investing with you, Athimbere, would be the equivalent of burying one’s wealth and forgetting the location.” Vairum flicks his hand twice toward his leaf, folds it toward himself and stands. “But anyone stupid enough to give you his money deserves to lose it.”
“Vairum!” Sivakami says from the kitchen. “That’s bad manners.”
“No, Amma.” Vairum sighs fast and wearily. “It’s a warning. I would hate, I would really hate to see anyone in this room lose money he can ill afford.”
“How disrespectful can a man be? Listen to your mother!” Goli shrills. “You keep your head in the clouds and act superior to try to keep the people of your village beneath you. They are not fooled!”
“So they’ll do what they choose.” Vairum disappears out the back.
“You are not fooled,” Goli commands those around him, and they all wag their heads, “No, no, yes, yes.”
The hall empties of the men, who go to the veranda to chew betel and chew over the latest gossip. Inside, the women sit to eat, including Vani, whose bright chatter is not dulled by the events of the morning. Janaki receives a welcome bonus: Vani’s story changes today. Now the dacoits cut off their own thumbs as part of their initiation ritual. Their weapons are adapted. Vani’s relative cooks and feeds them from his own hand, as he also does his thumbless lover, who had cut off her own digits as a gesture of unity with her first lover, killed young in a raid on a Hyderabad haveli. None of the other children had paid attention enough to realize they are lucky to be present at the change; none is paying attention now.
Saradha has her daughter the next week. The house throbs and surges with children, children having children, children expecting children, steaming milk and screaming mouths and Vani’s music, which beats like the sound of peace dovetailed with conflict.
Around this time, Sivakami is approached with a strange request. The neighbour two houses down, all of whose grandchildren have died at birth, asks Sivakami if she might birth her daughter’s next child. Sivakami is insulted and flattered-decorum means she can’t comply, while sympathy makes it difficult to turn the woman down. Gayatri hits upon a solution: if Sivakami can’t lend her hands, she can lend her handiwork. Sivakami doubtfully offers the family one of the scenes she has worked, an episode in the life of Krishna, the invincible child. She threads beads onto a string and sews the ends to the piece to make a necklace. Her neighbours gracefully accept. Some weeks after the daughter of their house, with the talisman hanging around her neck, gives birth to a healthy child, Sivakami receives another request. Sivakami fulfills it but worries that there is something untoward in this. She hides it from Vairum, who doesn’t pay much attention to the comings and goings of women and children from their house. She is not sure why she is uncomfortable disclosing the new vogue: perhaps because it is superstitious behaviour and she knows how he feels about that. Perhaps because she is helping others to have children.
Sivakami readies Thangam to go to Malapura. It has been thirty days since Krishnan’s birth and so it’s time for Goli to fetch her, but Thangam and Sivakami know how this usually goes: the packing and waiting, the unpacking and being taken off guard. This time, though, things might be different, since Goli hasn’t left Cholapatti in the weeks since his arrival.
He sleeps at the local chattram, not only dropping in on Sivakami more frequently than ever he did when he lived nearby, but occasionally convening his cronies around the veranda, where he tosses out schemes and schematics, logics and logistics, and figures vague or specific but always theoretical. The small group of men around the veranda is composed, Muchami tells Sivakami, of men who have faith in him despite that earlier mishap, including a couple who are hoping that, if they support him a little more, they might make their money back.
Sivakami hears, via eavesdropping and Muchami, Goli promoting a train-wheel foundry; a touring, and then a stationary, rice mill; a stationary, and then a touring, cinema; a stable of stud bulls; and a soap and petticoat depot.
Now: Sivakami is no businesswoman, though she keeps well abreast of Vairum’s instructions to Muchami with regard to the management of the lands. She rarely understands in advance how a purchase or sale or other strategic change will benefit them, but she more or less apprehends such matters in retrospect. She is also an excellent manager of household expenses, keeping Thangam’s manjakkani entirely separate from her dowry, separate expenses and separate income. Weddings are paid for from the dowry lands and the children’s daily expenses from the manjakkani, while Sivakami’s own paltry expenses are paid by Vairum. She accounts for every paisa, recording these in a ledger kept in the floor desk in the main hall.
So Sivakami knows they are about to run a surplus on the dowry monies. The next wedding to be arranged is Sita’s. She is ten, and were it not for a law recently passed against child marriage, it would be time to marry her off. As it is, they now must wait four years. Why should that money sit gathering dust? Sivakami thinks, influenced, it seems, by this new spirit of investment and improvement inflating her son and son-in-law. She doesn’t pretend to know any method of increasing money other than saving, nor does she think Goli has much money sense, but what if they were to support one of Goli’s schemes, with Vairum as a collaborator of sorts? Vairum has such an instinct for finance that it would surely then succeed. Sivakami starts to imagine the money being transformed into comfort for Thangam and her children, and a rapprochement between Goli and Vairum. Maybe Goli could become independent of his employment income! Maybe they could settle down in one place. Maybe close to here. Deep in a sleepless night, she conjures a good life for the new baby, Krishnan, her beading forgotten in her lap.
The next day, she opens the subject as she serves Vairum his morning meal.
“Vairum, kanna, let me talk to you about something.”
Vairum looks skeptical, as always with his mother, as though he has more important things on his mind. Sivakami serves the sambarpearl onion, his favourite-and bitter-gourd curry.
“You know that child-marriage outlawing nonsense means we must wait at least four years to marry Sita off,” she says. “So we have a surplus of cash that you will surely double by the time we need it.”
Vairum now looks wary.
Sivakami plunges on. “So I was wondering: why not give a show of family support? I know you will say your brother-in-law is not a good money manager…”
Vairum snorts at Sivakami’s delicate understatement.
“… but if you were to give some advice, some consulting, he might do well. The schemes don’t sound so far-fetched, and think how much it would mean to your sister.” Sivakami is gaining confidence-Vairum is listening. “And really: that dowry money is under your management, but technically, it belongs to them.”
At this last point of argument, Vairum’s expression turns sour. “He does not need to be reminded of that, Amma, though it seems he doesn’t dare remind us. Okay. I’ll consider investing in the cinema. I’ve been thinking of something like that anyway. My own money, not theirs. For Thangam Akka. I have no confidence in my brother-in-law, but if this will shut him up, it might be worth it. It’s obviously what he came here for. Maybe this will make him go away.”
Sivakami overlooks the rudeness of the last in consideration of her victory. It’s true that Goli has been obviously hoping to bring Vairum on board. Sivakami lets herself dream vaguely of a real success for Goli-a father capable of looking after his children, a man they can respect. Were she to force herself to think clearly and coldly about this, the fantasy would be unsustainable. She has seen no behaviour from Goli to make her believe in such a dream. But Vairum is dark, clear and cold, while Sivakami is none of these, and sees no need to be.
Now VISALAM GIVES BIRTH TO TWIN BOYS, having had a girl here a couple of years ago. As is customary, though, until the babies are out of danger from the evil eye, close neighbours and more distant relatives will be lied to and one baby will be kept hidden at all times. Sivakami makes the children solemnly swear to keep the babies under wraps, but if she knew how to listen to Vani’s music, she would hear that Vani is giving the secret away. Her music now features a strange new doubling, each note of the keening played in chorus.
And since there are only two people in Cholapatti who make a real effort to listen to Vani’s music, the other one gets suspicious.
Bharati corners Janaki in the schoolyard and demands, “Okay, what happened with Visalam’s baby? When little Krishnan was born, and Saradha’s baby, Vani’s music was strange, but now it’s different.”
“I can’t say.” Janaki stands in front of her friend, trying to think of how to get away. No information Bharati desires has ever successfully been withheld from her.
Sita passes them and hisses, “Get away from her, Janaki. Their kind kills boys.”
Janaki feels Bharati shudder, and hisses back, “It’s you, Sita, who’ll bring the evil eye on the house with all your death-talking. Amma said.”
She leads Bharati away by the elbow as though from a secret wound as Sita taunts them, “Amma said. Amma said.”
Bharati pulls her arm away from Janaki and walks quickly to a clump of coconut palms in the farthest corner of the schoolyard. Janaki trots after her, saying, “Wait. Wait.” Bharati leans against one of the trees, looking hard at the ground.
“Bharati. I’ll…” Janaki touches her friend’s arm. “You know Sita is always talking nonsense, just for sport. Listen,” she says, knowing she is about to betray her family for the first time. “Visalam had twins. Now you know. Swear you won’t tell,” she adds aggressively, as though her real motive had been to cement their friendship through the offering up of this sacrifice.
“Sita’s right, for once.” Bharati looks threatening and Janaki takes a step back. “Why do you think only one of my brothers lived? My mother can’t afford boys. She thinks I don’t know, but I watched her once, grinding pebbles into the baby’s porridge, and a week later, he died. I get chicken and eggs, look how strong I am! And the baby boy gets stones.”
Janaki takes another step back, and Bharati steps forward and yells at her, “Run, then! Run away!”
But Janaki is too bewildered to run, too scared to ask why boys would be expensive in Bharati’s caste, and once she thinks about it, a little suspicious of whether Bharati might be making up stories.
“I’m not running,” she defies her friend.
They are quiet for a time.
“Are you still going to come and listen to the music?” Janaki eventually asks.
Bharati looks at her. “Sure.”
“Don’t tell anyone about the twins,” Janaki adds, now that they’re speaking again. “Okay?”
Visalam’s husband and a gaggle of in-laws arrive for the newest babies’ eleventh-day ceremony. Kamalam adores the in-laws and follows them about like a small dog, smiling whenever they look at her. Janaki can’t summon much jealousy over this temporary crush and is moved to joke during the feast, “Maybe you should marry into this family, too.”
Kamalam, who takes everything Janaki says seriously, turns gravely to Visalam. “Please, Visalam Akka, can I marry your in-laws too?”
Visalam hugs Kamalam close, her maternal flesh wobbling as she giggles. “Yes, there are many eligible young men in the family. We just have to choose the right one for you. What should he be like?”
“I don’t know.” Kamalam’s response is muffled by the hug.
“Oh, come now.” Visalam pokes Kamalam in the ribs. “You don’t want to end up with someone like my husband, do you?”
Kamalam pulls away and buries her face in her hands. “I said, I don’t know.”
Saradha, who is also looking a little broad and matronly following the birth of her fourth child, attempts to enter into the spirit of the moment. “It’s Sita’s marriage that we need to arrange next, isn’t it? How old are you, Sita?” The younger girl doesn’t answer so Saradha answers herself. “Ten years completed already! It’s time, I say, time for a big party in Pudhukkottai or Pondicherry -somewhere French, where they haven’t passed laws against girls marrying in time!”
The varied volume and quality of laughter around the room demonstrates the variety of opinion around Madras Presidency on the child marriage law, and its attendant problems and solutions. Saradha persists.
“What would be really nice, right now, Sita,” she suggests, “is if you would play a little song on the veena for Visalam’s in-laws. She’s been taking lessons.”
The crowd murmurs approval.
Janaki tries to catch her grandmother’s eye: if they do have further designs on Visalam’s family, Sita’s playing won’t help in this aim. But Sivakami doesn’t notice her. And what is Sita thinking? She is taking her place behind Vani’s veena, sporting a little grin. Even she cannot possibly think she will suddenly become a virtuoso player just because she wants to impress? Janaki slowly brings her hands up to her ears, whether in a gesture of dismay or to block out sound is impossible to tell, but Kamalam unconsciously imitates her, two little monkeys guarding against the same evil. Sivakami catches Janaki’s eye then, and, annoyed, makes a gesture as though to bat their hands down, and the girls lower their hands to their laps.
Sita begins to play. Her song, “Sami Varnam,” sounds like the breath of a wounded animal. At first, the in-laws look as if each has been hit on the forehead with a clay pot. Then, as each notices the look on the others’ faces, they begin, once more, to laugh. They don’t mean to laugh at the music: they are not rude people. They are laughing at each other. Sivakami looks uncertain, almost as if she wants to enjoy their enjoyment. Sita is oblivious, grunting a little as she tries to control the bucking beast of sound beneath her fingers.
A shadow falls on the veena and the girl looks up to find Vani standing over her. Vani makes a flicking motion with one hand, and Sita abandons her song mid-strain. She rises and stumbles back. The bubbles of laughter have nearly all burst, bright, wet, prismatic.
Vani retunes the instrument. Sita looks around, blinking as though she has just awoken, and the laughter starts up again. Vani begins playing “Sami Varnam,” the same song, so naturally it sounds like a rebuke, though Janaki is willing to believe that’s not how she intends it. An elementary item in the south Indian classical repertoire, it’s a song occasionally used as a warm-up, and it is Vani’s regular time to play.
There’s a motion in the southwest corner of the hall, nearest the kitchen. Thangam is cranking the phonograph and laying the needle into its groove. Is this Thangam’s own rebuke, or her way of joining in? Janaki had forgotten the record started with “Sami Varnam,” and now Vani and the absent Madras musician are twinned, like the baby in the main hall, brought out for the naming ceremony, and the one hidden upstairs.
Sita, a tear starting down her cheek, runs straight out the back of the house, bumping into two walls in her haste.
Sivakami quietly tells Janaki to follow her sister.
Janaki doesn’t find Sita under the trees, or anywhere on the way to the canal, so, at the canal, she turns right, toward town. Head down, watching one foot place itself before the other in the mud, she bumps into Bharati, walking in just the same manner toward Sivakami’s house. Bharati’s maidservant Draupadi follows behind.
“Have you seen Sita?” Janaki inquires.
“Yeah, where was she going?”
“Where did it look like she was going?”
“I don’t know. Town?”
“I guess. I’m supposed to find her. Are you coming?”
“Isn’t Vani Amma playing? Hey,” Bharati stands and listens.
“Have you got someone visiting you?”
“No, no. It’s the gramophone.” Janaki doesn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of the toy. “Come on, come with me.”
They emerge at the main road and look in both directions. It is a market day, and the crowds are thick.
Bharati points east toward the next crossroads. “Is that her?
Janaki squints. She is hearing drums, bells and shouting, a non-Brahmin funeral procession, and now catches sight of Sita, a flash of terracotta paavaadai against the similar red-brown of the road.
“Yes, yes, come, let’s hurry.” She and Bharati weave up the road, dodging bullock carts and baskets, and then are engulfed by a huge herd of goats, going the opposite way. They cannot move until the animals are past, but the goats’ motion makes them feel they are flowing forward, as in water. Janaki loves goats almost as much as calves. She thinks it’s charming that the babies have just the same proportions as the grown-ups, tiny, like dolls. She taps each one on the forehead as it bawls past her.
There: Sita is halted at the fore of the crowd preceding the funeral procession, either stymied by the crush or watching the proceedings.
The dead man must be a Chettiar, Janaki thinks: he reclines on a huge bier of bright flowers. No Brahmin would go in for this kind of show. Ten impassive young fellows beat drums with curved sticks. Two or three men and one woman jump around, very worked up, nearly off their rockers with grief-for-hire. The drums and wailing are mesmerizing and though both Janaki and Bharati have received many warnings against getting too close to funeral processions, they draw closer.
Six little men carry the bier. It dips and rocks as they struggle against their sweaty palms and the surging of the crowd. One of them suddenly catches the fever of the paid mourners’ dance and starts shaking the bier as the others struggle to keep it steady. He is thrashing his body around and moaning, but not letting go, gripping tight even as someone tries to prise the pole from him.
Edging and shoving through the crowd, Janaki has nearly reached her immobile sister. The head of the great big corpse flops to one side and Janaki catches a glimpse of the face. She is startled to recognize him: N. Ranga Chettiar. She hadn’t heard that he died. She had seen Vairum chatting with him outside Minister and Gayatri’s house several weeks ago.
As the bier passes Sita, the bearer who caught the dance leaps, frenzied, away from the bier. The man walking beside him catches it in time, but he is very tall, and as he rises to his full height, the head flops, forcefully, toward the girls. The Chettiar’s eyes are open.
Janaki puts her hand on Sita’s arm.
Sita shudders. Janaki glances toward the corpse and back at her sister.
“Sita?” Janaki shakes her sister’s arm and repeats loudly, “Sita.”
Sita ignores her. There’s nothing Janaki hates more. She shakes her sister’s arm again, roughly, then takes her shoulder and spins Sita around to face her. “Sita!”
Sita speaks. “Palani veeboothi!”
The voice that comes out is not her own and Janaki jumps. Sita says it again: Holy ash from Palani mountain! There is something odd about her face. She is looking not directly at Janaki, but slightly off to the right.
“Palani veeboothi!” Sita shouts again.
“I heard you!” Janaki, on tiptoe, examines her, and makes the tone of her voice gentler when she asks, “Is something wrong?”
“Palani veeboothi!” Sita booms again.
“Would you stop shouting this!”
Even under such strained circumstances, they bicker.
“I am dead!” Sita proclaims. Bharati has caught up with them, and takes Sita’s other arm with a look of concern.
“Stop that, Sita,” Janaki says sternly. “Amma said…”
“I am dead! I am Ranga Chettiar!” Sita exclaims. “She looked, I came! She looked, I came!”
“Shush.” Janaki shudders. “What about Palani veeboothi?”
“Palani veeboothi!” Sita says loudly into the space to Janaki’s right. “I must have holy ash from Palani mountain, to cleanse my soul of guilt and memory.”
One or two people are looking their way. Janaki, feeling very strange, indicates that Bharati should help her lead Sita out of the crowd. Sita seems to walk all right, if a bit stiffly. Bharati speaks across Sita’s glassy gaze.
“The Chettiar’s life force must have jumped into her. I’ve heard of that.”
“You have?”
“My mother’s sister,” Bharati says. “It happened to her when she was very young. That’s why unmarried girls aren’t supposed to see funeral processions. We’re vulnerable.”
“Oh, God.” Janaki feels sick with anxiety. “Sita shouldn’t have gone so close. God, Amma is going to be so mad.”
“Palani veeboothi!”
“Shut up!” Janaki yells at whoever has taken up residence in her sister. “Is that all you need, to leave my sister? If we get you Palani veeboothi, will you go away?”
“Only Palani veeboothi can cleanse my soul of guilt and memory,” the Chettiar affirms.
They lead Sita home, taking her in by the back entrance, partly because Bharati, as a non-Brahmin, cannot walk on the Brahmin quarter, partly because Janaki would rather the neighbours not know before her grandmother does. Vani is still playing, though the gramophone has stopped. For a moment, the girls stand at the back door. Even the dead give respect to Vani’s playing, it appears: Sita is silent. Janaki leads her sister in and sits her in the courtyard while Bharati goes to sit under their usual tree, a few steps from the back door. Janaki takes a long look at Sita’s face, its expression addled yet intent: the look of someone with a single desire. Janaki leaves Sita in the courtyard, telling her firmly not to move.
By now, the jolly in-laws have departed. Vairum lies on the floor of the hall, listening to his wife’s music. Thangam is huddled in the corner by the gramophone. Everything looks highly normal. Janaki seeks Sivakami and finds her in the garden, looking critically at one of the mango trees, while Muchami squats beside it.
“Amma?”
“Mm?” Sivakami looks up. “Did you bring Sita home?”
“Sort of.”
The song from the living room ends, and Janaki hears a voice boom in the silence, “Palani veeboothi!”
She and her grandmother look at each other and hurry from the garden to the back of the cowshed, and from there through a door into the courtyard. Sita is a terracotta streak of silk and skin exiting the back door where Bharati catches her and holds her fast. Muchami is with them in a flash and takes hold of Sita just as Bharati is losing her strength. As Muchami pulls the struggling, writhing Sita over the threshold into the courtyard, Sivakami asks, “What happened?”
Janaki begins to explain, and Sivakami goes to close the courtyard door, glancing quizzically at the girl standing just beyond the threshold, a girl she doesn’t know. What luck she was passing! she thinks, though she doesn’t say anything to her, just nods a little. Perhaps a child of one of the Brahmin-quarter servants, though awfully well-dressed for that. Bharati doesn’t move, but stands looking at Sivakami, her chin raised, while Sivakami closes and bolts the courtyard door.
As soon as Sivakami hears the Chettiar’s demand, she dispatches Janaki to get some holy ash from the people three houses down who just got back from the Palani hills day before yesterday. And to get the priest from the temple. Vani resumes her playing, which calms Sita once more. They induce her to sit on a mat in the courtyard, since she has been multiply polluted: by Bharati’s touch, by Muchami’s, and of course by inhabitation by the spirit of a dead Chettiar. Janaki pictures Bharati sitting out back and realizes they shut the door in a panic without saying bye or thanks. But for Bharati, Sita could have been God knows where right now. I’ll apologize tomorrow, Janaki thinks.
The neighbour insists on bringing the holy ash herself, after changing her sari and refreshing her hair. She can sniff out a gossip opportunity anywhere within a ten-mile radius. By the time Janaki returns home with the priest, there are no fewer than ten people sitting and clicking their tongues in the front hall and occasionally going through the kitchen to peep at the now prone girl. The priest administers the ash externally, on the forehead and throat, and internally, a pinch on the tongue, then everyone sits around and waits.
After about two hours of muttering and twitching, Sita’s skinny frame leaps to its feet. She goose-steps to the well and draws a bucket of water. Face skyward, she dumps the bucket of water unceremoniously over her head. Three seconds later, her body gives a great heave and a shudder and collapses to the ground.
A cry goes up among the watchers, and they pick her up and carry her into the hall. She is feverish and barely conscious, but restored to herself.
They are settling her in the hall and congratulating one another on the success of the treatment-Janaki thinks they are acting a bit too much as if they thought of it, forgetting it was in fact the dead man’s own suggestion-when Goli bursts through the door like unwelcome relief. He has a wild look in his eye, and today is extra dandy, with bowler hat and cane.
“My brother-in-law has called me!” Goli announces. “Such an honour!”
What he says is true; Vairum awaits him on the roof. Goli sweeps through the hordes of gigglers and gossipers and general hangers-on in a single noisy motion. Sivakami and Gayatri join Muchami in the garden, where they can hear the conversation beginning above. Gayatri and Muchami, in whom Sivakami has confided, look at each other with conspiratorial hope and then turn their attention inward and upward.
“I’m interested in the cinema, Goli Athimbere.” Vairum must not even have given Goli time to sit. Sivakami winces, wishing Vairum were better about observing niceties. He is standing, and they can see his hands and head for a second at the balustrade; then he walks away.
“The cinema is an enormously interesting proposition,” Goli agrees. “Do you know-”
“I know, I know,” Vairum interrupts. “Look-”
“Oh, I’m looking, Vairum,” Goli says, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “I’m looking.”
Sivakami shakes her head.
“Okay,” Vairum goes on. “I don’t know what you know, but you do know that these are tricky times for investment, which is the whole reason all these possibilities are…” Vairum is uncharacteristically searching for words.
“Possible? That’s only a part of it. Naturally, a part of it, but a person needs a nose for these things. It’s not everyone who can get on board.” Goli’s voice sounds as if he is marching pompously back and forth across the roof.
“It’s a good bet, the cinema, Athimbere.” Vairum is no longer hesitating. “The only aspect of the proposal that makes me nervous is the fact that you are in charge.”
Sivakami, Muchami and Gayatri simultaneously lower their foreheads onto their palms.
“But the amount of investment you need takes the project largely out of your hands,” Vairum proceeds, reasonable and direct. “I will front the rest of the money-because it gives me the controlling interest. You must admit, it’s safer, for you and for everyone else involved.”
Incredibly, Goli has said nothing through this speech, but now he sounds as though he is orbiting madly, an electron around Vairum’s nucleus.
“I spit on your money, you cheap-nosed freak of a not-quite-man! How dare you insult me with your generosity! Don’t you think for a second you are getting any part of this so let that be a lesson to you with your swell-headed individualistic ambitions and attitudes! I ought to-”
Vairum bellows, “You cannot for a second speak of what it is to be a man, you who leave your children to be raised by others.”
Sivakami prays the children did not hear that. (They did.) She knows Vairum doesn’t mind the children’s presence, not at all. It is Goli he resents. Oh, why did she suggest this?
Goli’s voice circles as he charges down the spiral staircase. He pitches into the hall from the stairwell, chopping the side of his right hand against his left palm.
“Pack your bags. We are leaving.” He flies around the room, shoving each child in the direction of Thangam’s baggage, which stands ready in the corner of the hall. “No objections, children! You will not insist any longer on living in this house. Time and again I have tried to make you all come and live with me. You always refuse: my Vairum Mama says this, my Sivakami Patti says that!”
What he is saying is untrue, but this is immaterial.
Sita is hauled to her feet, unprotesting but also largely unconscious. Laddu, Janaki and Kamalam mill into one another, bumping, confused. Radhai, the toddler, howls and shoves her mother’s sari into her mouth as Thangam moves toward the door. Visalam has stealthily backed out into the garden with her baby. Chances are Goli won’t notice her, but Sivakami closes the garden door just in case.
“No more!” Goli hollers. “This time, I will not take no for an answer. Go, pack!”
The children have no idea what this means as far as they are concerned.
“PACK!”
Sivakami indicates that Muchami should fetch a trunk from upstairs.
They all get on the 92:35 train that night. By morning, they will reach the Karnatak country, where Goli is stationed at present, the farthest they have ever been from home.