THEY ARRIVE AT TEN IN THE MORNING, by which time Cholapatti would have been sweltering and still. In Cholapatti, the packed air is so hot and moist that every villager feels a privileged proximity to Goddess Earth-each person feels her sweat.
In the Karnatak country, the air swirls and rustles round, cool as the children have known only water to be, water dippered from the big clay pot in the darkest corner of the pantry. The house is like theirs in Cholapatti; the same brick floors and clay-shingled roof, but smaller. It is a government-issue house and comes with a government-issue houseboy who bobs ingratiatingly as they arrive and then disappears.
The children watch their father take soap and a towel and stride toward the back of the house. He returns ten minutes later, shaved and washed. They are still in the front hall, mostly still standing and very quiet. The one or two who sat scramble to their feet. Goli looks at them with indignant expectation. He shouts, “Not clean yet? Move!”
Laddu and Sita rush to the back, grabbing towels where they saw Goli do so. There must be more than one bathroom, they think, if they were supposed to be bathing while Goli was. But no, there is only one bathroom. One by one, then, they bathe in cold water and then sit in the hall, uncomfortable.
Goli paces and mutters, to and fro, up and down, sometimes right out the front door. Each time one of the children stands to take her turn at the bath, he shouts, “Move!” at the receding back, which then jumps and runs for the bathroom.
Thangam is exhausted from the trip and lies under a thin dhurri with the baby in the other room. As the last child is bathing, Thangam calls out feebly, “There is no food in the house. You have to get them some food.”
Goli boomingly echoes his wife, “No food in the house? No food in the house. Okay, we will eat out.” He starts out the door, but no one follows him. He returns to the door and shouts, “Come!”
Kamalam is still in the washroom. The other children point that way.
“Hm? What?”
“Kamalam is still taking her bath,” Sita says helpfully.
Kamalam comes hurrying along at that moment.
“Hm!” Goli sweeps his hand upward and starts out the door again. The children run to follow him. Their hair is still uncombed, and Kamalam’s blouse is buttoned wrong, but they are reasonably clean. They turn two corners and stop in front of a low building: two parallel walls connected by a thatch roof, steam coming out the open ends. Goli enters, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t you tell your grandmother. I don’t want to be hearing about this forever.”
It is a non-Brahmin establishment. Their grandmother would never let them near such a place. Janaki very much disapproves, but what is morality on an empty stomach?
A harried-looking boy looks up at them from the floor, where he is clearing disposable plates made from stitched-together leaves. He throws the plates, coated with the remains of meals, to two grateful dogs in a roadside ditch. His eyes swing to a man squatting shinily among vats and cauldrons. The place seats only five, and two places are taken. Goli has now taken a third. The man looks at the children, then addresses his pots. “They’ll have to eat in shifts, that’s all.”
The children give one another looks. They didn’t understand the man. It is as though his words come from funny places in his mouth. It hadn’t struck home before: this is the Karnatak country they have learned of in school, where people speak the Kannada language. But why would they speak a language no one can understand? Tamil is normal, Kannada is strange, like a one-legged bird or two-headed cow-recognizable but not the way things are meant to be.
Their father is yelling, “Sit! Sit!”
The boy has laid out two more places. They all step forward together. Panic surges in the boy’s face and he says something to Goli. Goli raises one hand to point at the dish the boy is carrying and says to the children, “Only two of you now. Not enough room.”
Sita flounces forward to take her place, dragging Radhai. Kamalam, Laddu and Janaki politely watch the dogs instead of the diners. The dogs, dirt collected in the hollows between their jagged ribs, lap the sauces and grains from the ridges of the leaves, always licking twice where once would do. Finally, they do a quick sniffover. Finding no more pickings, one mounts the other and starts a dance. Janaki knows enough to look away and Laddu knows enough to know why, but Kamalam keeps staring, her mouth slightly ajar, until Janaki spins her by the shoulder to face the street.
The food is as strange as everything else. Goli vanishes upon finishing his meal, citing important business. By the time the children find their way back to the house, which is still cold and dark, homesickness is burling up in them. It will soon harden and form a ring, marking the end of one age, the beginning of another.
Only Sita is perfectly cheerful, bright-eyed and willing as they have never seen her. She arranges their bundles neatly in the hall. Thangam rises while she is doing this.
“Amma,” Sita inquires, apparently having decided that now they are together as a family, her mother should be addressed as such, “shall I take the baby for a while? Don’t you want to bathe?”
Thangam gives them the mixed blessing of her smile, like the sun shining through clouds. Sita takes baby Krishnan, and Thangam goes to her bath. When she returns, they sit together on the veranda, relieved that these are also a fixture in this strange new country. In the combined strength of Thangam’s faint glow and the dilute sunshine, they begin to feel almost warm.
Neighbourhood children grow curious about them, but since they cannot speak to one another, they choose the shared language of sand-lot cricket. Even the girls join in, but not Sita, who takes stock of the staples and purchases vegetables and milk, lamp oil and kolam powder out of the ten rupees Sivakami slipped to her as they left. She even cleans a little. When Goli returns from work, Sita bustles to the door and hands him a hot tumbler of coffee.
Goli appears sullen and takes his coffee wordlessly out onto the veranda. Janaki and Kamalam are out there, playing at catching the other’s hand, like bear cubs slapping at river fish. They become quiet at the sight of Goli’s face, but their giggles quickly escalate once more, until Goli howls, “Hush!”
They freeze.
“Am I sweating to earn your keep so that you can torture…?” He jabs his hand at them, and then lapses back into his ruminations.
Supper is a silent matter. Laddu makes one attempt to tell the story of something funny he saw on their journey, but Goli breathes harder, the huff and puff of a coming storm. Janaki signals her less barometrically sensitive brother to abandon the story.
Sita is still suspiciously happy. She serves all of them first and eats afterward with Thangam.
The days pass, without school, almost without talk. Janaki has never lived with so few words. They continue to play with the neighbour children, games the children know from home; you don’t need to talk to play kabbadi.
Sita, though, seems to be completely occupied in housework. Janaki is suspicious because she has always tricked others into doing her chores, faking a cut by making blood out of vermilion powder mixed in water, or trading tasks so relentlessly that Janaki would lose track of who owed whom and end up doing all the work. Here, Sita is industrious to the point of making them all a bit nervous.(Is Sita happy because all is finally as it should be? For the first time she feels part of the natural order? But few admit, even though they know, that the order’s nature is that its elements line up only to drift apart again. Sita appears happy, but she smells of desperation.)
Thangam works alongside Sita, offering no instructions or suggestions even when Sita turns out rubbery dosais and powdered condiments one would sooner use to dust a baby’s bottom than to fire up a meal. It is strange that the house and position don’t come with a government-issue cook, Janaki thinks, but perhaps no stranger than anything else.
One evening, Janaki and Kamalam see their dad at the end of the road, talking with two dark and paunchy men. They are all laughing, slapping their thighs. Goli spots his daughters and calls them over. As they arrive he grabs them by the shoulders and tells the men, “Two of mine.” He slaps his daughters on their backs. “Finally got them out of the grip of my brother-in-law. None of his own, you know?” He turns his head sideways and gives a wink. “None of his own. Right?”
The men laugh again.
“I’ve got more than I can count,” Goli brags. “That brother-in-law, rich as a Chettiar, but will he share it? Ah, what to do? The poor fellow can’t have kids…”
The two men giggle.
“I’ll forgive him.” Goli shakes his head and squishes the two girls together. They can’t remember him ever touching them before. “You know, if it’s true that a man’s real fortune is his family, and you and I know it is, well then I’m a millionaire.” Goli shoves the girls toward home and says, “Run. Tell your sister I’m on my way home, coffee better be ready. Scoot.”
Generally, home supplies are purchased on credit, the bill paid quarterly. Cash is used only for the daily purchase of vegetables from the market or passing vendors. Here, in the Karnatak country, the merchants have told Sita they will not give credit. She doesn’t understand and they will not explain. Is it because their father is not a local, because he’ll move on? But he’s been here a year and is posted here one year more, long enough, certainly, to have established a reputation.
Sita had pooh-poohed the merchants, rudely and with dignity. She bought supplies with the ten rupees Sivakami had slipped her; she had splurged, believing her father would want nothing but the best. She was right; he does want nothing but the best. But he clearly had forgotten to give her more money-poor man, she thinks, so much on his mind and now his household has doubled in size. She decided to remind him, show how willing and able she is to take over running the household.
While serving him his afternoon coffee, she asks, “Can I give the houseboy a shopping list, Appa? Will you give me money to give him?”
He looks at her as though he doesn’t know who she is and how she came to be in his house. “Money?”
“For groceries, Appa, we need some-”
“Management, management!” He raps his knuckles hard and humorously on her noggin. She winces. He winks. “What have I been keeping you at your grandmother’s for, if you still do not know how to manage money?”
“I…” She thinks she does know how to manage money, but she is probably wrong. That was Vairum’s house, an upside-down world, everything wrong. She needs to learn things again.
“Payday is Thursday.” She beams, but he is looking elsewhere. “Thursday I will bring home such food as you have never seen, squashes and cucumbers and sweets, yes?”
She happily claps her hands and retires to the kitchen.
The following evening, Janaki and Kamalam are sitting on the veranda. They forget the palanguzhi board between them when they see their father appear on the seat of a bullock cart. Radhai, who has been watching covetously, seizes a handful of cowries. Kamalam grabs her wrist but then releases it as Goli shouts, “Come! Come!”
Janaki and Kamalam’s instinct is to run into the house, which they do, with Radhai following, scared, on their heels, but Goli soon follows, still shouting, “Come! Come! Come!”
When the girls run into the house, looking like a startled school of fish, Sita guesses the reason and decants the coffee. Flushed with pleasure, she trots it out with two sweets, but Goli takes no notice.
“Come, I say!” he hollers, waving. “Into the cart! Where is your precious mother? Thangam! Thangam!”
Sita looks anxious and eager to obey but unsure of what action to take to do so. Goli blusters past her into the next room, then reappears and clarifies, “Into the cart!”
Moments later, they are all nested in damp straw, trundling up the road clinging to boards that threaten to pull away. Janaki whispers to Kamalam, “There is a cow pulling this cart.”
Goli hears and makes a grunting noise-“Huh?”-but has his nose pointed at the horizon.
Janaki whispers, “Cows are mothers, they give us everything. They must be worshipped, not made to work.”
Sita’s eyes narrow at them in a skilled imitation of her former self. “Hoi,” she instructs. “Stop telling secrets against Appa.”
Kamalam looks as though she’s been struck. Goli whips round in his seat, glaring. Janaki hisses at Sita, “We weren’t.”
The cart rolls on and Goli’s eyes roll reverentially back to his fantasies. Sita twists her mouth at her sisters. Goli leaps from his seat to the ground. He stumbles slightly and readjusts his dhoti. As the bullock cart jolts to a halt, Goli is already some distance away, gesturing to a building by the side of the road and asking, “Unh? Unh?” in a tone suggesting they should say what they think, and what they should think is that it’s great.
They all climb out cautiously, Sita holding the baby while Thangam dismounts. Goli has already run up to the building, evidently a recently defunct cinema. He turns as they trudge toward him, and whispers as if all the world is a stage, “Criminal, really. The price. Got it for a song-a filmi song! Can you sing one, kids?”
The kids can’t or don’t, but he’s not stopping.
“Lots of people going under these days. The stupid ones. Used to be you could get away with not being on the smarts. But not these days. These days it’s be smart or die. Kids, the sinking has started-and you are hitched to a swimmer.”
Thangam’s voice is both unbelieving and utterly without surprise. “You bought it?”
Goli beams at her and calls back as he starts running around the building, peering and banging and measuring things with the span of his hand. “Lock, stock and barrel. Me and several of my associates. Opportunity is knocking down our door. The ground floor suddenly lowered and why, we just got on.”
Thangam is whispering now, “I thought… it was a gamble…?”
Goli is in front of her in a flash, the pockets under his eyes pulsing. The humidity is giving Janaki a slight headache.
“You are repeating your brother’s words to me? He wanted me to work for him. For him!” Goli has begun chopping his right hand against his left palm.
Thangam speaks again, her eyes shut. “He wanted to be responsible-”
“No!”
The children step back in unison as the hot roar of refusal whips past them. Sita alone stands her ground and looks at her siblings triumphantly.
“He wanted to be my boss. No respect for me, me! His elder brother-in-law! Go and work for him… big shot…”
In the field before the cinema, they all privately recollect the scene between their father and uncle. One would guess from Sita’s smug face that in her version, Goli is the winner. In Janaki and Laddu’s memories, the victor’s identity is less certain. Kamalam recalls words but not meanings. She thinks she wants to go home, but she is not certain where that is, just now.
As uncomfortable as all of this is, they all appreciate Sita’s continuing good humour. The occasional lapse, such as that in the cart, reminds them of how good they have it now. That night, for example, Sita doesn’t give Janaki any lentils from the rasam. Since Janaki hates that bottom-of-the-pot sludge, Sita usually stirs it up and dumps it on double thick. But not tonight. Janaki ascribes this to Sita’s new-found mental peace. Then Sita eats-last, as she has taken it upon herself to do. Janaki sees her take the last of the rasam. It is nearly clear. There are almost no lentils in the broth.
Janaki presumes Sita forgot the lentils, a logical supposition given the quality of food Sita has been serving since their arrival.
The next morning, they eat pazhiah sadam, fermented rice with yogourt. (“Best thing for young tummies,” their grandmother always says.) But the buttermilk is watery and they are all hungry by mid-morning. When they come to Sita mock-whining that they want a snack, they expect her indulgence with milk sweets, since she’s been handing them out freely all week. Instead, Sita barks that if they’ve got nothing better to do than annoy her, why don’t they spend their time finding some fruit in the garden. The children drift out of the house, avoiding the two stunted, barren banana trees that stand at the end of the yard like more children their father forgot. Lunch is rice, lots of rice but with rasam even thinner than it was last night. For supper, the same. Kamalam asks for more and is given a big chunk of plain rice with a pickled baby mango from the jar Sivakami packed with their luggage. Thangam doesn’t eat, saying she’s not hungry. She drinks half a cup of nearly transparent buttermilk and goes to bed. Their father still has not arrived and Sita will not eat until after he does. Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock pass, and Sita sits in the dark. She says she wants it dark so everyone else can sleep, but she wiped out the bottom of the lamp oil can with cotton wicks the night before. At eleven-thirty there is a loud knocking on the doors and Goli’s voice calls, “Thangam! Eh, Thangam!”
Sita lights a lamp and unbolts the doors. Goli drops his dapper hat and swinging cane in a corner. He drops himself onto a waiting bamboo mat. Sita holds the oversized lamp with the itty-bitty flame, so he can see. She asks, “Supper?”
He is prone and his eyes closed. He turns onto his side and gets comfortable as he says, “No. Ate at the club.”
Sita blinks, then glances at the lamp. She hurries to the kitchen and eats in a race against the dwindling flame.
For breakfast and lunch the day following, they have rice with buttermilk so thin that it looks like kanji, water that old people strain from boiled rice and drink for strength. Each of the children pretends the runny white meal is something else: onion sambar, spinach curry, bitter gourd. Kamalam starts to sniffle a little as she bites into the tangy flesh of another baby mango. Janaki signals her, “What?”
Kamalam answers aloud, “I miss Amma.”
Janaki’s sinuses start to sting, too, at the thought of their grandmother, her generous kitchen and care. Sita ends this nonsense. “Hush. Stop that. You have your ‘amma’ right here. You want to go back to living with Vairum Mama, where we are not wanted?”
That night, Goli’s work forces him to stay over in a neighbouring town. His family eat their poor meal early, all together, and gather in the hall. The moon has narrowed nightly and is almost ready to turn and begin its pregnant climb again. In the bluish darkness of the hall, the children lie or sit on their bedrolls and play word games, making up rhymes and riddles, laughing loud and free in the night that gladly does not contain their father. Sita shines brightest of all in the open darkness of this night. Why? Tomorrow is Thursday, payday.
It is afternoon. Sita is sitting on the veranda when Goli arrives home from work the next evening-empty-handed, but with a spring in his step.
“Coffee?” he asks, walking past Sita, into the house, with his head opposing the direction of his travel by about thirty degrees. Sita had put off making the coffee, hoping-not, though she would never admit it, assuming-he would bring some of the precious dark dust, since she has enough to brew only a thimbleful. She sits a moment longer on the veranda, where all sit to sun their cares or forget them by watching their neighbours, where private pains meet the life of the street, where decisions are made and deals contracted, along streets just like this one all over Madras Presidency. Different people, different language, but the same worries. And despite all this, Sita sits all alone in the rosy dusk, her toes over- and underlapping one another, her chin on her knees. In the rapid sunset, it is only moments before she can no longer see her toenails and is isolated even from herself.
Taking a breath, she picks herself up and walks into the house just like her father did, her head cocked at an unreasonable angle, trying to see what he sees. There is no more milk in the house. She brews the weak coffee and dumps three tablespoons of sugar through the pale steam. Thank God sugar and rice come in huge sacks. Plenty of those commodities remain. Looks like sugar and rice for supper tonight.
She places the tumbler and bowl on a saucer and carries it out to her father. No more English biscuits or store-bought sweets. Goli is pacing to and fro. He grasps the bowl and pours the coffee from the tumbler to blend and cool it. He is anticipating, as every drinker of great South Indian coffee does, the pleasure of foam and steam rising as the creamy liquid, falling from the lip of the stainless steel tumbler, hits the cylindrical bowl. He gets steam, but no foam. He frowns and peers into the bowl, fighting more the fog in his mind than that around the dish, trying to see what is wrong. Sita stands by, her mind a blank with hundreds of squirming questions nibbling its edges. Finally, Goli looks up, his spectacles opaque from the mist, and asks her, “What is this?”
She answers, reflexively obedient. “Appa, coffee, Appa.”
“It doesn’t look like coffee,” he grunts.
“Appa, that’s what coffee looks like without milk, Appa.” She bobs in a sort of curtsy.
“Who drinks coffee with no milk?” Goli addresses the ceiling. “Am I an Englishman?”
Sita swallows the air in her mouth with great difficulty and asks, “Did… did you get paid, today, Appa?”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes.” Goli smiles. “Stopped after work and put the whole thing down on that new cinema of ours. Ready to fire her up any day now.” He makes another long waterfall of the coffee and remembers his displeasure. “Milk!”
“We have no milk, Appa,” Sita explains gently, her face tense.
“Get some, then, are there no cows left in the world?” he jokes. “Listen, girl, you can hear them now…”
The questions in Sita’s mind are taking big bites now, feasting on her eleven-year-old brain. She replies, “I need money, Appa.”
“Money? You need money?” Goli rises. “It is not enough that I am slaving from dawn until dusk, working for the English, buying properties, doing business, you want money now too?”
“No, Appa, for supplies,” Sita minces. “To buy milk, vegetables, lentils, butter…”
Goli throws the coffee onto the street. “Just like your mother, no management sense. Just like that stupid cook! I told her, get out!” He begins pacing, reliving the scene. “I said, My wife will cook, my daughter will cook! What else are you doing? I don’t have infinite resources, you know. You have to learn to plan.”
“But-” Sita attempts.
“Do not talk back to me!” Goli chops his left hand against his right palm terrifyingly. “I told you, you must learn. The budget is all used up-too bad. I’m going to the club.”
That night, they eat plain boiled rice with a choice of side dish: sugar or baby mango. Breakfast: the same. Lunch: ditto.
At five o’clock, Laddu shows up with three onions and a sweet potato. Sita is elated, her salivary glands springing to action. The springs quickly run dry, though, when she thinks to ask, “Laddu. Where did you get these?”
Laddu’s head cocks at thirty degrees, apparently the angle at which an individual can dissociate from any present situation. He replies, “My friend gifted them to me. They had too many.”
Sita heaves half a sigh of relief. It is interrupted by the remembrance that Laddu cannot speak the same language as any of his friends. Now she asks, “Does your friend know he gifted them to you?”
Laddu is fascinated by a spiderweb in the northwest corner of the kitchen. Sita asks no more questions and prepares a decent meal. Her siblings relish it like no meal they’ve ever eaten, their delight pathetic. Sita gags on every mouthful and lies awake that night on an empty stomach.
In the morning, Goli sits groggy on his mat. This he does for long minutes each morning, sometimes rubbing his head or cleaning his fingernails. It is as though his internal mechanisms are winding. Soon something will snap and he will career for the bathroom as though released from a colossal slingshot, the mist evaporating from his eyes like clouds from a lake. Once this happens, he cannot be stopped. Sita has chosen this, his calmest hour (quarter-hour, really, but who’s counting?), for her second approach.
“Appa?”
No sign of response. She creeps closer, and kneels. “Appa? Appa, I know I should have planned better, Appa, I know I splurged, but I… I really need to buy some more supplies, Appa. I can’t… I have nothing left to cook…”
She trails off weakly, distracted by the oddness of his demeanour. He is only a yard away but peering at her as though from a long way off. Suddenly, he zooms in, his pupils dilating with the rush of landing. He springs to his feet.
“That’s it. That’s it, I’ve had it with your requests. If you will not stop bothering me, if you cannot take responsibility for yourself and live by my rules, you can all go back to live with your grandmother. Pack up, you’re all leaving on the 9:30 train.”
Sita works her mouth in horror and confusion. Janaki, Kamalam and Laddu are rising around her; they open their eyes to Goli’s words. Thangam, who had already risen, lies back down. Sita replies, “That’s not… But…”
“Nine-thirty,” Goli thunders. “Be ready. If you won’t be happy any other way, that’s what you will have.”
Sita doesn’t turn to look at her siblings but feels their alkaline shock neutralized by her stinging helplessness.
Nine o’clock sees them trooping out the door. Thangam sits in the large room, by the exit, clutching Krishnan and Radhai. She is holding Radhai so tightly, in fact, that the child keeps trying to squirm out of her pale-knuckled grasp. As each of the older children files past, he or she drops a kiss on Thangam’s powdery skin. She says nothing, nor even moves, but looks long and almost sullenly on each. Only as the last one leaves, a gold-flecked tear trails down her cheek.
Sita wonders why Goli couldn’t give her grocery money yet can pay for their tickets back to Cholapatti, but decides it’s not her problem. He strolls whistling from the bus stop toward the station, the snuff pocket of his kurta jangling. Each child carries some baggage or bedding, since Goli has arranged no bullock cart for them, nor have they seen the houseboy more than twice in the week since they arrived.
A shrivelled, cackling man waves bunches of faded paper pinwheels at everyone hurrying into the station. Goli tosses a rupee coin at him. The old fellow catches it with startling ease as Goli relieves him of the entire bunch, distributing one each to his faithless children and the remainder magnanimously among all the children in sight. The old man wanders off elated-a rupee is many times more than that bunch was worth. Kamalam had already been struggling under her baggage allotment and is a sad sight, trying to carry the pinwheel as well.
A freak of architecture has created a gale force wind in the doorway to the station. As the children pass through the vacuum, the curved petals of each of their pinwheels rip free of their moorings, so that the pointy ends dangle like seaweed out of water.
The four children approach the platform while Goli buys their tickets. One by one, they toss their pinwheels onto the track. May as well have saved the effort and just put the coin on the rails for the train to flatten, Sita thinks morosely. Three of the pinwheels lie limp and motionless, and the fourth rotates in futile quarter-turns, one direction, then the other, back, back again, until a beggar child wanders up the track and urinates on it.
The tickets are two and a half rupees each, ten rupees for the four children, just the amount Sita used to feed the whole family for the ten days that the experiment lasted. Goli gets a ticket for himself, too.
Their baggage is stowed and they are on their way. Goli is in a gleeful mood, buying snacks, cracking jokes, making a party with everyone in the compartment. Isn’t this fun, his attitude seems to say. Charming man with his four beautiful children, off for a holiday. Listening to him speak to other passengers, the children learn he had had a good night at the club-another source of supplemental income, though this pursuit is often as expensive as it is profitable.
In the spirit of a game he asks his children, “What if… I were murdered? What if someone got on at the next stop and stabbed me dead, right here and now?”
They look like a naive painting of dismayed witnesses to a crime, their faces yet without depth or perspective. Smiles wiggle nervously on all their faces except Kamalam’s, who starts to cry. Maybe on account of the fleeting thought that, scary as it sounds, she might be happier if he were dead. Her tears attract Goli’s attention.
He asks sympathetically, “Missing Vairum Mama?” and slides down the wooden seat, shoving Janaki and Sita along and knocking Laddu off the end. Now he is across from Kamalam, her face filling his vision as he leans in closer and closer, head cocked like a father crow’s. “I only let you all live with him because he can’t have children of his own.”
Closer.
“He can’t have kids.”
Kamalam is looking down. She is making an enormous effort at continence but it’s not quite enough: one last slippery tear bubbles out to run over her cheek.
Goli bounds to his feet and roars at the people ramrod still all around the compartment. Chop chop chop chop goes hand against palm.
“He talks against me! He is a stingy coward who can’t have relations with his wife! He tries to steal my children! He talks against me!”
Kamalam bellows through her weeping, her eyes still shut, “Don’t talk about my uncle that way!”
Goli leaps over and hits her.
He stands and fumes at the door as the train pulls into a station. He gets out and paces around the platform, then buys fifty packages of snacks from another vendor who looks as if he hasn’t had a sale all year. Goli throws them through the windows at everyone in the compartment, telling them to eat. Janaki hands one to her little sister, who will not take it. Janaki puts it in her lap. There the package sits untouched until Laddu points at it. She nods faintly. He eats it with alacrity.
Goli is strutting up and down, stuffing a couple of packages of the stale, greasy bits into his mouth. Like an aristocratic host at a royal banquet, he is aggressively hospitable, ordering everyone to eat. The new people in the car smile at his neighbourliness, his good spirit, and their mood affects even those who were present before, as they and the children nibble the age-old snacks. Janaki offers some of her own to Kamalam, who doesn’t respond. There are finger marks on Kamalam’s pale cheek.
In the city, their father puts them on the train bound for Kulithalai. He bids farewell to all of his good friends from the compartment and now to his children. He has business to which he must attend.
They reach Cholapatti slightly after sunset. Not knowing how to tell their grandmother or Muchami of their arrival, they walk home from the station, dragging bags, bedding, bottoms. Sivakami looks them over anxiously but asks no questions. Vairum, when he sees them, takes a breath as though to say something, but Sivakami raises a hand, and he keeps silent.
Late that night, Sita, Laddu and Janaki all rise with terrible diarrhea. Only Kamalam sleeps soundly.