THE NEXT DAY, hordes of Brahmins from up and down the quarter come to pay condolences. Sivakami wishes she were more like others, like her granddaughter Saradha, for instance, who clearly takes comfort in hearing the same encomiums repeated again and again by people who barely knew Thangam. Instead, as when Hanumarathnam died, Sivakami wishes they would all keep quiet, or, better yet, stay away.
When Muchami’s and Mari’s families come to the back to pay respects, gnashing and screeching as is appropriate in their community, Sivakami wonders if it is within her rights to tell them to leave. Out of consideration for Muchami and Mari, she doesn’t. But Mari does-telling her parents and her mother-in-law that their histrionics are not needed. Mari herself, when she arrived that morning, expressed her condolences to Sivakami with quiet dignity and went about her chores.
In the days after they return from Munnur, little Krishnan takes to sleeping at Rukmini’s house. By the time Sivakami is fully aware that it has become a habit, she is not sure how to break it. It seems cruel to deny a motherless child all he is receiving from Rukmini: he accompanies her in every activity; at home, he sits in her lap; they play games, have secret jokes and a code language. Rukmini makes sweets for him daily and bids him bring his sisters to eat them.
Sivakami is in a quandary: she wants Krishnan to enjoy these attentions, but she feels she must remain responsible, in certain ways, for his moral and physical upkeep. She also thinks Rukmini might be too soft, too grateful for Krishnan’s presence, to hold to certain old-fashioned child-raising practices.
So Sivakami requires that Krishnan come to take his breakfast at her house: pazhiah sadam, day-old rice, mixed with yogourt-the best thing for a young tummy. One of his sisters feeds him-Sivakami herself cannot touch it because it is kept to ferment overnight. Every Wednesday and Saturday, she insists he comes to take his oil bath and, every few months, a dose of castor oil. In other words, she asks only that Krishnan complete the severer and less pleasant of his basic requirements at her house because the sense of discipline and plain living these impart-the gifts of a conservative upbringing-will remain the measure of his origins.
Sivakami is motivated by concern not only for Krishnan’s well-being, but also for the family’s. “A house that gives a son for adoption has no sons for seven generations.” The proverb reverberates in her conscience. Krishnan is with her for safekeeping; he belongs to the house of his father. Rukmini may tend him further, but she cannot be allowed to feel he is her son.
Rukmini understands Sivakami’s concerns, though she doesn’t think about them too deeply. She is flattered by the violent resistance Krishnan displays whenever his sisters come to fetch him. While she doesn’t interfere with their missions, neither does she assist.
Krishnan is always reluctant to leave Rukmini-she is his favourite person. He doesn’t respond to cajoling nor to ordering. He is becoming the boy Sivakami meant him to be: precious and headstrong. Nor can his sisters bribe him-little they offer can compete with his treatment at Rukmini’s. Increasingly, they resort to tricks to get him to come home. Fortunately, Janaki proves herself a master of minor deceptions, and enjoys devising them-for a good cause, of course.
Sita stays on to keep company with her family and give them comfort in the wake of Thangam’s death. (Or so goes the protocol. Sita’s specialty has always been discomfort, and relative marital happiness has not gentled her. Her husband is a stable, timid man, a compiler of agricultural statistics who admires and resents her. She is not interested in his feelings, but his behaviour suits her well and she has seen no need to change hers.) When she is the one sent to fetch Krishnan, she blackmails him, explaining to him in a low, sincere voice that unless he comes with her immediately, she will fix it so that he never sees Rukmini again. Krishnan listens, wide-eyed, without reason to disbelieve her, and obeys.
“Poor Akka,” she remarks the Friday after their return to Cholapatti, as she and her sisters sit, after their oil bath, drying their hair.
“Mm-hm,” says Janaki, peering critically at her embroidery, a bouquet of flowers, none of which she recognizes. She drew the pattern after a photo in one of Minister’s books on English gardens.
“Forced to give up her children one by one like that,” Sita continues.
Janaki and Kamalam are silent, Janaki looking at Sita, Kamalam lying on a cot with her hair fanned and falling over the edges, incense burning beneath to perfume it.
“I could never.” Sita shakes her head. “I’d rather die.”
“Well, she didn’t give us up.” Janaki finally rises to the bait. “Amma just looked after us for them because Appa’s job…”
Sita points at Janaki. “Vairum Mama stole us because he’s jealous.”
“No-” Janaki starts.
“And because he hates Appa. He would do anything to sabotage Appa. Poor Appa, just trying to make an honest living, and he has this business shark for a brother-in-law.”
Janaki tries again lamely. “What-”
“Is your hair on fire, Kamalam?” Sita inquires sprightly.
Kamalam, who had let her eyes drift shut, springs up, trembling.
“Oh,” Sita laughs, “I guess it was just the incense smoke. You know I never think you wash the oil out properly. Can’t blame me for worrying!”
Janaki stands. “You look like you could use a nap, Sitakka.” She gestures to Kamalam with her head and starts for the veranda. “Don’t you feel tired?”
“No,” Sita replies. “Where are you two going?”
Around this time, Murthy invites some cousins to stay with him and Rukmini. Down on their luck, as so many Brahmins are these days, they had lost their lands and home, and approached Murthy at a wedding a month or two earlier and appealed to him for assistance.
“We must help our own.” Rukmini parrots her husband’s words to Sivakami the day before the cousins arrive. “So much assistance available to those low-caste types, but Brahmins are as poor as they ever were and no one thinks about what services they give! Who will assist them?”
Sivakami agrees and congratulates her on their generosity. They are not the wealthiest family in the Brahmin quarter-that status has always been reserved for Minister’s family, though she suspects Vairum might have exceeded even them, not that it has changed her lifestyle or the children’s. Murthy and Rukmini are comfortable, though, and childless, and live modestly in a spacious house, built for the large, extended family that has dwindled to these two over the course of three short generations.
These relatives are expected to arrive by bus, and the next day, Murthy, a splash of betel-stained spittle ornamenting his fresh-pressed kurta, borrows Sivakami’s bullock cart to meet them. When he returns the cart, he brings them in to meet her. They huddle together as if persecuted and have to be bid to enter several times, Sivakami calling from the pantry.
They have been travelling and need to bathe, they protest in whimpers. The wife is barely four foot nine, and her husband perhaps two inches taller. Their faces are pinched and ingratiating, their clothing poor. Their son, a strapping, touchy-looking youth, carries their little baggage.
“Welcome,” says Sivakami with energetic friendliness, inspired by Rukmini and Murthy’s caste feeling to ensure they feel warmly received. She sends Janaki and Kamalam out toward them, one with a tray of tumblers of water, the other with plates of snacks. “Eat something small at least. And you must come take a meal here soon. Our home is yours, just as it is Rukmini and Murthy’s.”
The couple, who had been casting looks of rapid appraisal at the Ramar, the safe and the girls’ jewellery, thank her, wagging their heads so vigorously their bodies move. The son smiles meanly and turns to go.
“Ugh,” Sita shudders, when they have barely gone. “Unattractive lot!”
“No more out of you, young lady!” Sivakami’s sharpness startles both her and her granddaughters. “They are in need and it is an act of good to give charity. Rukmini and Murthy will do well in their next lives.”
Sita doesn’t retort but later tells Janaki, “I’m all in favour of caste solidarity, but I have a bad feeling about them.”
Just because Sita said it, Janaki feels compelled to disagree. Privately, though, she fears Sita intuits malignancy all too accurately.
WHAT A STRANGE FEW MONTHS this has been for our dear ones on the Brahmin quarter, Sivakami thinks, a couple of months later. January is drawing in, with the Pongal holiday. They won’t celebrate this festival, nor any other, for a year, while they are in mourning.
In September, Thangam’s death. Then, last month, Gayatri’s mother-in-law had decided someone had hidden a cobra in her bun, and tried to use the scythe to cut off her hair. She killed herself-not as quickly as would have been merciful, but still, it was a relief to the family and probably to the old woman herself, who had for years been living in an increasing state of paranoia.
And now Rukmini is ill. She has been suffering from a severe digestive affliction since about the time Murthy’s cousins came to stay with them. At first, it had seemed no more than heartburn. Rukmini confided in Sivakami: she feared her cousin-in-law’s cooking didn’t agree with her. The cousin was helping in the kitchen. Her cooking tasted wonderful, and it was nice to eat someone else’s food. The cousin cooked Thanjavur-style, and the flavours were quite exotic. But Rukmini had grown scared of eating. She was mystified. The vegetables were not undercooked. She was being served items in the correct order. She had worried that perhaps the cousin-in-law was violating rules of ecchel, the contamination of saliva, and patthu, the contamination of cooked food, which orthodox Brahmins observe strictly. What if she was insufficiently superstitious, one of these progressive sorts, and so was not washing her hands after touching cooked rice, for instance? But the cook, who watched her, said she was quite above board. And no one else in the household was in any discomfort. Rukmini’s stomach alone bloated and kicked after every meal.
And it grew large: it was only when Sivakami began noticing Rukmini’s tummy that she inquired. Rukmini had been a sturdy woman, with the flat stomach and well-proportioned hips that are the preserve of childless women. Now she has grown considerably thinner, though her tummy has inflated like a rubber tire.
When Sivakami told Rukmini she was not looking well, Rukmini didn’t understand, because saying someone has grown thin is also used as a formality, a greeting, to show concern. So it took a few tries before Sivakami could make clear that she genuinely thought Rukmini was looking very thin and that her swelling stomach might be a cause for concern. She asked if, perhaps, Rukmini could, after all these years, be pregnant. Rukmini laughed and blushed, clapped her cheeks and made slapping motions in the air with her hands.
“No, no,” she said, “I’m not pregnant. Really, the thought!” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You remember, Janaki came to help me just two weeks ago-I still get my monthlies.”
Sivakami shrugged. “Sometimes-rarely, but I’ve heard of it-women get their periods even when they’re pregnant. Or at least bleed a little.”
“Possibly,” Rukmini said politely, “but I really don’t think I’m pregnant. I don’t feel any different. Just a bit weak, maybe.”
Sivakami gave her some holy ash from Palani mountain, known for its potency in expelling unwanted foreign bodies while strengthening desirable ones. She also told Rukmini to drink a broth nightly of her brother Venketu’s patented Cure-All ConcentrateTM, as a purgative and blood-thickener. She had many extra jars, since Venketu’s wife sent a care package of their products every time a granddaughter came to Sivakami’s house to give birth.
Sivakami also advised Rukmini to take doses of their gripe water, since she had developed a terrible gas problem. Sometimes Sivakami herself would hear, from within her own house, Rukmini’s prodigiously windy emissions. Neighbourhood children shamelessly imitated the poor woman’s range of belches and farts. The sound rose even above the wash of the canal.
Rukmini conscientiously followed every prescription, but her misery did not abate. Her tummy was hard to the touch. She looked like a dying willow with a parasitic fungus clinging to its trunk.
As if all this weren’t hard enough on a woman’s vanity, Rukmini’s hair began coming out in handfuls. Rukmini’s hair had always been a bit thin, and she owned a couple of hairpieces, for special occasions. Now her own measly strands were barely sufficient to hold them on. Finally, she was reduced to sheltering her pate under her sari end, like a widow or Muslim. She was misery incarnate. Her only joy was Krishnan.
So Sivakami’s heart burned at the thought of tearing Krishnan from Rukmini’s bony bosom. How could she? How could she not?
Three nights running, Sivakami has awoken from the same dream, her heart thrumming and brow running with it, clear and cryptic as a telegram.
In the dream, Rukmini’s long-dead mother-in-law, Annam, looked at an illustrated catalogue of hairpieces. The pieces kept trying to scurry away off the pages and into the scrub. The mother-in-law seemed to be charged with minding them, though she would occasionally pick one up and tug at it until it loosened a bit and then study it, flattening it or holding it up to the sun, making the hairpiece whimper or shriek.
Sivakami was puzzled: Annam was a widow when she died, and so she appeared in the dream, with a head stubbly as a coconut. A widow has no need or use for hairpieces. Annam replied that soon her daughter-in-law would come and take the hair from her stomach. Oh, said Sivakami. So Rukmini’s stomach is full of hair? Yes, said Annam, she will come and take the hair from her stomach and fashion it into hairpieces.
Sivakami tried reason, the worst tactic one can attempt in a dream. “But why would Rukmini make hairpieces?”
“If my daughter-in-law is dead, she will not get my son’s money,” Murthy’s mother explains. “She will need some income, so she will have to make hairpieces to sell.”
“Who will get your son’s money, then?” asked Sivakami. This was not reason, but curiosity: if she had been awake, she might have asked what use a dead woman has for money.
“Our grandson,” the woman replied.
Halfway between wake and sleeping, she felt dread. In that dream voice that takes all the effort of shouting, Sivakami argued, “You have no grandson.”
“Oh,” said Rukmini’s mother-in-law, “we have a grandson, you and I.”
Here Sivakami really woke, gasping as though breathing through cobwebs. She didn’t discuss this with Muchami on the way to or from her bath, but finally, three days later, they talked. Muchami had heard of a poison that causes a big ball to grow in the stomach and long hairs to grow from it, until the victim’s life is crowded from her belly. They admit between them that they fear Rukmini’s cousins are poisoning her to get her husband’s house and possibly his money. They admit, shaking, that if the cousins consider him a threat, Krishnan may be poisoned next. They must remove him from that house.
That morning, Sivakami dispatches Janaki and Kamalam to fetch their little brother to eat pazhiah sadam at home. As he eats, she examines his stomach for signs of swelling, but Krishnan’s shorts look as baggy as ever. She asks, “Have you had stomach aches lately, Krishnan-baby?”
Krishnan furrows his brow-is this is a trick to get him to take an extra dose of castor oil? Sivakami grunts in such a way as not to make him more suspicious, and says nothing more.
While Krishnan is eating, however, Muchami slips next door to have a conference with Murthy, and when Krishnan goes back next door, Rukmini wails, “Go home, kanna! You don’t live here, you don’t belong here, we don’t want you.”
Krishnan stands still, confused, not only because Rukmini is shouting all this, each phrase louder than the last, but because she has fallen to her knees and embraced him, so he couldn’t move even if he wanted to.
Janaki and Kamalam appear, having been instructed by their grandmother to come and bring their little brother home again. He looks over his shoulder, sees them and flings his arms around Rukmini’s neck, howling, “I won’t go!”
Janaki starts to cry-she cannot do this, not so soon after Thangam’s death. She leans against a wall, tears coursing from unblinking eyes. Kamalam, silent and alarmed, takes her elder sister by the hand and the shoulder and leads her home.
Three rooms away, in the courtyard, Murthy’s cousins half-pretend they don’t know what is happening. Murthy tears his hair quietly on the veranda, waiting to accuse his cousin once Krishnan is safely out of the picture. What a sorry state the world is in, he tells Sivakami later, thanking her for having sent Muchami with that alert, when one trusts a servant over one’s flesh and blood.
Finally Rukmini tries to thrust Krishnan from her. His little hands pinch and scrabble and he starts again to yell, but Rukmini eventually pins his arms to his sides, kisses every feature of his face and runs from the room, her stomach visible on either side of her.
Krishnan tries to follow, but she closes a door against him. Sita arrives within minutes, with Muchami, who carries Krishnan home.
The cousins object when confronted, denying that they have done anything, saying the accusations are outrageous. Then they steal away in the night, more outlaws than in-laws.
It would have been safe then for Krishnan to return. Certainly, he tries it, meekly. He and Rukmini have visits, but Muchami and Murthy don’t face protests when they carry him home each dusk. Over the next six weeks, Rukmini grows gaunt. Her stomach, though it grows no bigger, becomes painful. For the final ten days of her illness, she is confined to bed, able to take nothing but a little water. Then she, too, expires.
Circumstances being suspect, Rukmini is made to submit in death to the doctor’s examination she refused in life. Cause of death is listed as cancer of the stomach, but in fact, the doctor has never seen a growth like this one-a wrinkled tumour, like a mammoth brain, but from it grow long, matted hairs, five feet long in places. He considers removing it for research-maybe he could write a paper?-but concludes the tropics have robbed him of his professional ambition-he has no desire to take the trouble of preserving and analyzing it. It is a curiosity, but it is not going to make him famous. It is too bizarre for that-just a bit of a novelty. He sews the woman’s stomach up, the flaps baggy over the deflated cavern, and sends word that the family may have her back for her funeral.
Surely little Krishnan must have done something very bad in a previous life, Sivakami thinks, the night after Rukmini’s funeral, watching the child sleep between his elder sisters. How else could it be that a child never really knows a mother at all and yet loses not one mother but two? It’s a riddle fit for gods, who are fond of perversity.
She thinks back on the scandals she has been witness to in these months and wonders, trying to keep herself from feeling prurient, how many there have been on the Brahmin quarter that she doesn’t know about. She wonders why she works so hard to keep up appearances-surely everyone’s family has misfortunes. Surely they are nothing to be ashamed of. She doesn’t condemn either Minister or Murthy for having madness and criminality in their families, but if she didn’t know them better, she might. She might wonder if these traits would rear their ugly heads in others among their families. Say if she was considering a bride or groom from a family within which lurked such shadows.
This, of course, is why she has invested such energy and effort in keeping the facade of her family stainless. Thank God no scandal has enmeshed them yet, though she often senses a circling threat. Goli’s behaviour is so unpredictable; Vairum’s beliefs are so unconventional. It’s just my imagination, she tells herself. They would never do anything to hurt the children. Well, Vairum wouldn’t. And Goli would never hurt them deliberately…
She looks at the children, as blameless and earnest in sleep as in waking, and says a quick prayer to her gods against the evil eye: please let it remain so. Thangam’s children’s futures are precarious as it is. Sivakami is their only guarantor and all she can give them is their reputations.