JANAKI GRADUALLY LEARNS about Baskaran’s family from her husband, as they snuggle together nights in the upper room, as well as from observation.
Dhoraisamy looks after the institutions funded by the trust and enjoys and endures the social approbation, privileges and headaches that accompany this responsibility. He has to hire the cooks and other servants for the paadasaalai, for example, but has use of them for his own family. He is fortunate, as he is wont to say more often than necessary, in having an excellent overseer for all the charity’s operational needs.
“Mr. V. Kandasamy.” He presented the accountant to Janaki with a flourish. “A gem of a man, a bit excitable and perhaps over-efficient, perhaps takes things a bit too personally, but it’s all in the interests of the trust!”
Mr. Kandasamy, a small square man with a nervous squint, stood, clutching one of the largest ledgers, which he nearly dropped as he tried to put his palms together in greeting.
Janaki meets a few of Baskaran’s friends, Brahmins for the most part, much like him: well-dressed boys with acute senses of humour. Like most fashionable Brahmin youth these days, Baskaran is in favour of Indian independence, and though he has moments of genuinely lathered passion about this, he can’t take any of it too seriously for too long. Confronted by anyone with very deep convictions, he treads between Gandhian glamour and Nehruvian practicality. He and his friends tend to laugh off fuming, sweaty types who care more about ideas than people. Janaki gathers that Baskaran is a friend whom friends count on, and a son in whom his father confides.
Janaki fully approves of Baskaran in everything but his snuff-taking and his apparent lack of caste feeling. He appears to believe everyone is created equal and is equally deserving of respect, but that is so clearly not the case-she doesn’t know where to start, though, and so doesn’t try. At least, it seems, he has no intention of making her eat in non-Brahmins’ houses or do other improper things that would dishonour her and her upbringing.
Some nights, Baskaran asks her questions about her childhood, so different from his. He asks how it was that they ended up living at her grandmother’s house, and Janaki dutifully gives him the standard answer, that her grandmother thought the children needed some place they could stay, that her mother’s health was always fragile and it was better she not spread her energies so thin. When others have asked her this, her answer has sounded plausible. She’s not sure why, now, it sounds inadequate, almost deceitful. Perhaps Baskaran picks up on this because he continues to ask.
“That’s unusual, though-that you would live with your mother’s mother, instead of with your father’s parents, isn’t it?” he asks gently but with real interest.
“Yes,” Janaki replies hesitantly. “I’m not sure why that was. Maybe my mother’s mother thought she could do a better job. My father’s parents aren’t too well off.”
“Have I heard that they sold a lot of land to your uncle?” Baskaran shifts a little, on his side, his head leaning into his hand, the other hand on Janaki’s stomach.
“Mm-hm,” Janaki says. “But it wasn’t my uncle’s money that paid for us, mostly. For our upbringing, I mean. It was my grandmother’s own inheritance, her manjakkani.”
“Interesting.” Baskaran furrows his brow. “But wasn’t your dad’s salary enough? It sounds like your grandmother wasn’t exactly extravagant.”
Janaki feels herself blushing. “My dad… isn’t very good with money.” She takes a breath, aware of the depth and luxury of this intimacy with Baskaran, of how protected she feels in this room, revealing to him things she has never said to anyone else. “I doubt he ever offered to pay for us. I don’t think-”
She starts to cry and Baskaran sits up, alarmed, and puts his arm around her.
“I don’t think he ever really wanted to keep us. I don’t think he even really noticed we were gone. And my mother never fought to keep us.” She is sobbing against his chest, Baskaran holding her, patting her head, his lips to her forehead.
He wipes her cheeks with his thumb. “But your grandmother loved you, didn’t she?”
Janaki nods.
“She took good care of you. And your uncle,” he continues, “he paid for your wedding. He’s obviously very proud of you. Look at how puffed up he was when they came to visit at Navaratri.”
Janaki sniffs and hiccups, calming. She knows he is trying to reassure and cheer her. But he has no idea of the trauma she has suffered (she’s not sure she had any idea until she surprised herself with these tears), and she doesn’t know whether to be glad of this or angry.
“And I think you are wonderful,” he finishes, looking into her eyes. “You are a gem, and I will always look after you.”
Now she knows: she is glad, glad, glad he has never suffered the humiliations of neglect.
Later, he falls asleep before she does, though she is drowsy, emptied of tears and of lust. In that state, she wonders why she didn’t mention Bharati when talking about her father. Because the conversation took another turn? Because it’s not directly relevant? She wonders when and if she will have the chance, and in wondering, realizes that, even if the chance arises, she may not tell.
Janaki spends several hours each morning and evening in the women’s room at Senior Mami’s request. Janaki dislikes the room because it is untidy and airless and filled with Vasantha and Swarna’s tension. They dislike it because it’s the only room in the house where they absolutely cannot speak their minds (such as they are) because Senior Mami is sure to hear.
Janaki had sensed between Swarna and Vasantha a relationship that seemed more complex than that of sisters-in-law, and Baskaran had confirmed for her that they had been neighbours and friends since childhood. Vasantha’s elder brother had gone to law school with Baskaran’s brother Madhavan, who met his classmate’s sister and fell in love. When it came time for the second brother, Easwaran, to marry, Vasantha suggested her chum.
“I don’t think my mother much cares for either girl”-Baskaran smiles apologetically-“but she didn’t stand in the way of my brothers’ choosing. Perhaps there was no one else better!”
Janaki, diplomatically, listens without responding. Senior Mami torments the sisters-in-law to a degree that makes Janaki wonder if she admitted them to the family primarily for harassment. The women are, in Janaki’s opinion, vapid and spiteful. In Senior Mami’s position, she would ignore them, but they are difficult to ignore.
When Vasantha and Swarna first enter the women’s room after a meal has concluded, there is typically a long silence. The sisters-in-law settle themselves, picking up magazines or patting a child. Janaki sits neither with nor apart from them. Finally, one of the two introduces a topic.
“I hear,” Vasantha might say, clearing her throat and speaking as quietly as possible, “I hear Mangala Mami’s son has declared he will only marry a widow-so they have placed an advertisement!”
“Oh,” says Swarna, certain of what she thinks but not of what she should say. “Terrible, terrible.”
“Why is it terrible?” Senior Mami calls from her room.
Vasantha and Swarna, who know she must agree with them, have no idea why.
“Ahem,” Vasantha might cough. Or she might attempt a rejoinder. “Well, it’s wrong. A widow!”
“Hush.” The disembodied voice of their mother-in-law silences them.
If neither sister-in-law speaks, Senior Mami says, “Say something, bring me some news.”
So one of them starts, “My sister sent me a letter. Her husband took their children to see a movie with Rita Hayworth!”
Janaki waits to find out if this is good or bad. The other one also waits. Senior Mami, though they can’t see her, is waiting.
Finally, one says, “How awful!” or “How wonderful!” Senior Mami says, “Hush,” and silence is reinstated. Often, now, she follows this command with another: “Play, Janaki.” Which Janaki does, her sisters-in-law striking daggers at her with glances so she’s forced to close her eyes.
Her sisters-in-law, lying on cushions in the women’s room, often read aloud from newspapers and magazines, sensational stories of freedom fighters Janaki listens to with disapproval while she labours at her handiwork. They also pass on local gossip, including politically themed stories: a Brahmin man who rents half of a ramshackle house on Single Street is known to be on the independence workers’ message circuit. He is a cook who has three daughters and no sons, and therefore can’t risk imprisonment, but whenever a freedom fighter is on the lam nearby, this man, who can barely afford pride, carries dosais to them. Janaki imagines men crouched in tall grass, mud caked in their hair, shaming their loved ones for a country that has never existed and probably never will.
Even one of Vani’s two gigantic lawyer uncles is gradually and bitterly parting ways with his family by giving free legal defence to, as he puts it, “people who haven’t done anything wrong.” His family disputes his definition of “wrong,” suggesting that breaking the law is criminal and therefore “wrong,” but he informs them rudely that the laws themselves might be “wrong.”
These are confusing times, thinks Janaki, as an excuse for not trying harder to understand them. She purses her lips and admires a strip of trim she has just finished crocheting for a baby’s undershirt-something real and pleasing. She’s sure Sivakami would disapprove of her holding political opinions, and she has no intention of forming any. Why do Indians need to run the country, as long as they can live freely and get jobs? Most often, the talk reminds her of Bharati’s first father, as she has come to think of him. She wonders if he got out of jail, if he managed to stay out. This leads her to think of her own father. Will she ever see Goli again? And what is Bharati doing now?
Owing to Baskaran’s family’s wealth, Janaki had expected that festivals here would be celebrated with the kind of flair Gayatri used to display before her family fortunes started to slide. Instead, Deepavali and Pongal in the Pandiyoor household are marked by celebrations proper but not extravagant, a spirit more in keeping with her grandmother’s. All the household members are given money, new clothes or both, and guests are received. Janaki has taken over the responsibility for drawing the kolam daily on the threshold and in the puja room. She is given a box of coloured powders she may use to make special designs, as is customary during this festival
Vasantha mutters bitterly throughout these festivals about how much better her natal house does them. Swarna readily agrees, in private corners of the house far away from the women’s room. Janaki can’t say the same, but had hoped for better and analyzes the reasons their celebrations are so relatively paltry. It is not that Baskaran’s family can’t afford to do better: the gifts given to all the family members are generous. Nor do either of her parents-in-law believe in austerity, the way Sivakami does. Rather, Janaki senses that Senior Mami has no interest in opening their house to pomp and chatter.
This family displays its bourgeois pedigree in other ways. One is in the distribution of charity during the festival for the goddess Meenakshi of Madurai. Annually, the temple goddess is married in grand style. There are daily processions, in which a smallish idol is dressed and pulled through the streets by worshippers in a two-storey wooden temple car, and lengthy pujas at her temple. The city floods with pilgrims and petitioners as each caste community commemorates the occasion in its own way. The Kozhandaisamy Travellers’ Rest Home, run by Baskaran’s family’s trust, feeds Brahmin pilgrims for free and ladles water and buttermilk out on the street to anyone who is thirsty, caste-no-bar. Every family member boasts of how the drinks are offered to all without regard to caste, suggesting they think it a virtue to reach out to other castes, even if they wouldn’t think of practising this in any other way. Family members themselves stay in the chattram and serve, which Janaki considers evidence of Brahmins’ committed magnanimity. She, too, takes her turn in the hot sun with the ladle. They wouldn’t serve untouchables, of course, but untouchables don’t pass and don’t ask.
And in May, when the hot weather is at its blasting peak, Janaki witnesses Senior Mami preferring the force of her hospitality on the Brahmin quarter of Pandiyoor. She sponsors a moral discourse, to last ten evenings, by a Thanjavur philosopher-orator of some repute. Janaki is told, by Baskaran, who thinks it amusing, and by Vasantha and Swarna, who find it tiresome, that hearing and talking with these bhagavadars is one of Senior Mami’s favourite activities. She sponsors these events once or twice annually, erecting a canopy along half the length of Double Street so that the entire Brahmin quarter may attend and be edified. They are even offered coffee, water and snacks as the man declaims from the veranda.
Each afternoon, the young philosopher is invited to take his post-tiffin coffee in Dhoraisamy’s study, so that Senior Mami may converse with him, from her room, on the previous night’s lecture. He and Dhoraisamy sit in the study, and Senior Mami, whom they can hear through a high air vent between the two rooms, puts questions and comments to the scholar by addressing them, for propriety’s sake, to her husband. At night, Baskaran, laughing until he cries, imitates his father, who looks from the air vent to the young philosopher as though watching a tennis match. Dhoraisamy doesn’t read much; neither does Baskaran. It would never occur to them to take on wandering scholars, but Baskaran finds it vastly amusing to watch his mother engaged in her favourite sport. Janaki is, nightly, convinced by the young orator. She has never seen anyone extemporize like this, drawing on other commentators, quoting scripture extensively-and yet her mother-in-law, each afternoon, converts Janaki again with arguments demonstrating equal breadth and acuity of reference! Each afternoon, whether because he doesn’t want to argue with his hostess, or because he feels himself defeated in the debate, the young scholar capitulates, complimenting Dhoraisamy on his wife’s erudition.
When first she heard Senior Mami arguing with the scholar on his own terms, Janaki felt a flooding envy that she was not better educated. She wondered how long it would take her to read through Senior Mami’s library and become such a complex and wide-ranging thinker herself. The impulse quickly passed, and by the time she hears the scholar’s concluding arguments, at the end of the lecture series, when he, as required, delivers moral prescriptions and rules for good living, she has developed quite a different way of thinking. The point of educating women, in her opinion, is to train them to better uphold the virtue and well-being of the family. Otherwise, she thinks, they may as well be courtesans. Janaki’s own ambition is to be a good wife and mother, an aim at which she is not convinced her mother-in-law has succeeded.
Even though Senior Mami observes the basic rules of propriety, never showing her face to their guest and never addressing him directly, Janaki, in thoughts so private she can hardly articulate them to herself, much less to Baskaran, thinks her mother-in-law is unladylike. Her children don’t seem to have suffered from her seeming coldness, but Janaki thinks this is because her emasculated father-in-law, whom she adores, is so encouraging and affectionate, and compensates. The more she thinks about it, in fact, the more she wonders whether Senior Mami’s erudition, which cows Janaki, robbed Baskaran of the motivation to study. What would be the point? he might have thought. His elder brothers are lawyers, his mother an intellectual. What did they leave for him but the position of assistant to his father, the part of the good son?
Janaki’s reflections on her mother-in-law’s style of domestic management are, in part, being provoked by Vasantha and Swarna, who have begun to mutter about getting out. Janaki hadn’t been sure she understood correctly, when first they began their dark hints. Janaki, hurrying to serve food with Vasantha, mentioned that their father-in-law had suggested she might teach the rudiments of Carnatic music to Vasantha’s eldest daughter, who had begun showing interest. Vasantha drew up defensively and told Janaki, “You know, an extended family household isn’t the only way. Just for your information.” Janaki had no idea what this meant, but when Swarna said something similar in response to an equally innocuous comment, Janaki asked Baskaran what was happening.
Baskaran smiled unhappily. “Yes, my brothers have spoken to me. Their wives want an independent household. Each. Vasantha Mani’s eldest sister’s sister-in-law didn’t get along with her mother-in-law and they just took their share of the family property and set up on their own. Now Vasantha Mani thinks it’s a done thing. And it’s the type of idea Swarna would have come up with on her own, if Vasantha Mani hadn’t planted it.”
“But… that’s a ridiculous…” Janaki felt short of breath, her stomach roiling. “Your father surely won’t… your mother cannot permit this. I know she will not,” she concluded, feeling she had reassured herself slightly.
Perhaps Senior Mami should be told, Janaki thinks. But if Vasantha and Swarna learn that Janaki was in any way responsible for telling her, they would be furious, and Janaki is not sure she wants to risk that. Further, while Janaki knows her mother-in-law would bridle and resist the parting, she also blames Senior Mami for not doing more to cultivate the attachment and affection of her daughters-in-law. Janaki and Baskaran choose to stay out of the matter. In the months following, it becomes clear that Vasantha and Swarna are pressuring their husbands. Neither man, however, is a master of strategy or courage. They try to approach their father, but sideways, like crabs, waving their eyes at their goal but afraid to face it full on. Their father, no fonder of confrontations than they are, scuttles away from them as fast as they can approach.
When they achieve no results, Vasantha and Swarna implement their own plans of action, using the slim means available to them. Perhaps inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns of passive resistance, they begin campaigns of passive aggression. They begin interfering in the kitchen, ordering the cooks to use quantities of ghee and sugar that would have befitted a wedding pre-war and are now a terrific expense and challenge to procure. None of the staff dares question them; Mr. Kandasamy sweats over the accounts; the paadasaalai boys start pudging up. They further deplete the family coffers by insisting that their husbands replace all their jewellery and buy only imported cloth in a time when the whole country is turning to native goods. But the genius of Vasantha and Swarna’s campaign is its exploitation of Senior Mami’s possibly fatal flaw. When they serve her, they no longer limit what she is offered, but instead press on her enormous quantities of the rich food, so that she becomes grossly flatulent. They also become flagrantly insouciant with her.
Finding the atmosphere in the women’s room intolerable, Janaki looks for chores to occupy her elsewhere in the house, and comes up with the idea of offering Sanskrit tutorials to the paadasaalai boys. She asks Baskaran to approach the instructor in basic Sanskrit on her behalf.
The pupils are a proud and pitiable crew. Among them are two pairs of brothers, but all eighteen boys look similar: their heads are shaved, leaving a brief kudumi, which hairstyle is now found only in the priestly ranks. They wear a standard-issue dhoti and breast cloth of coarse cotton weave. They are here because their parents cannot afford to give them the quality of nutrition and education the charity will give them, and so have left the children here to be raised in orthodoxy. Janaki might identify with these children more than she would ever admit. She relieves the Sanskrit master of the younger students, delivering the drills and exercises whose practice she perfected in her own questing childhood, and finds, in this work, a release from the pressure-sealed jar of the household.
Baskaran suggests to Janaki that his brothers don’t really want households of their own, run by their wives. “Who would,” he shrugs slyly, “with wives like that?”
Janaki thinks it improper for her to answer, and disloyal, even though she feels little loyalty to her sisters-in-law, especially in this low enterprise.
Baskaran frowns at her. “Is this what you want, also? To have your own home?”
“I absolutely do not. Chi!”
“Good, good,” says Baskaran, smoothing the quilt. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” she says irritably as she turns the lamp key down and gets into bed. “Very happy. I couldn’t be happier.”
Families should not even be permitted to think of splitting up. Authority is responsibility, unity is security, Gandhi wants to split from the British, Jinnah wants Muslims to split from India, the non-Brahmins want to split from polite society… how will it end? Think of Vairum and Vani. Janaki tosses and rails in sleep while Baskaran holds the quilt fast.
She dreams of visiting Vasantha Nadu and Swarna Nadu, two countries in a house so large she never sees more than two walls at once. The floor is covered in what Janaki first thinks are enormous kolams coloured in with bright powders, but when she draws near to admire them, she realizes they are maps drawn in rice powder and the differently coloured areas are territories and states, each with its own governor and laws.
Vasantha and Swarna swarm like ants through an anthill, continually brushing away borders and redrawing them differently, quick as Janaki herself erases and redraws kolam lines in the morning when she sleepily connects the wrong dots. Janaki yearns to return to Janakipattu, her own city, but it has been erased, or amalgamated. She is stateless and homeless. Responsible to no one; no one responsible for her. She knows, in dreaming as in waking life, that there is no worse fate-standing still, condemned forever to pass through the strange lands that appear and vanish beneath her unmoving feet.
Clerk ex machina: the meek and ever-reliable accountant, Mr. Kandasamy, provides a means of resolution.
“In chess,” he explains to Dhoraisamy and Baskaran, having clearly rehearsed every word, “this would be called a defensive move, except that, for Sir, and Sir’s family, there is no risk. At this juncture, all the higher castes have reason to fear. If-no, let us say, when Congress assumes power, they will work hard to prove they have no bias toward the Brahmin. They will treat with us severely. We will be thoroughly oppressed. There will not only be the reserved posts for the lower castes in government and colleges, the administrative and educational biases. I have started to suspect there will also be vengeful taxation. It is not without precedent.” Mr. Kandasamy took a breath, marking the end of his magnificent preamble.
Dhoraisamy had worked himself into a complicit lather. “What to do? Our dear Mr. Kandasamy, you alone can advise us.”
“Well.” Mr. Kandasamy mopped his brow, looking earnest and purposeful. “We know that the charity’s finances are thoroughly separate from those of the family. And we have kept them strictly and, more importantly, provably so. However, I do think it my responsibility to warn Sir of possible vulnerability to others who are adept at and interested in manipulation. This is my suggestion: you must house your personal assets in what is known as a ‘tax shelter.’ Have you heard this term?” Mr. Kandasamy looked suddenly a few inches taller, Baskaran reported to Janaki with a giggle, and as though he had more hair.
“No, no, no, no.” Dhoraisamy looked to his son, who also shrugged.
“Permit me to be direct.” Mr. Kandasamy smiled with greater assurance than usual. “Your greatest assets are your own sons, are they not? One thinks it could be wise to house them… in houses. Of their own.”
Baskaran and his father made faces demonstrating shock and reluctant receptiveness. Mr. Kandasamy plowed on. “Give them their share of their personal inheritances and pretend-if only on the books, more than this you need not do except to revenue inspectors and their relatives-you no longer care for them. It is the one way to ensure Sir operates at a loss.”
Mr. Kandasamy, who, Baskaran later remarks, has a surprising flair for drama, allows a decorous silence, within which the mood alters and settles. “I know it must seem a heartless and scandalous notion,” he goes on, “not to keep one’s children and grandchildren under one’s own roof, but many respectable families are considering this, and naturally I would… ahem, one would never suggest that Sir’s sons go further than Single Street.” Finally, Mr. Kandasamy draws a breath to conclude his speech. “The charitable institution was established to propagate the values and good name of our caste. It is my duty to guard against any threat to the institution and its values. I urge Sir to take this suggestion. Avoid any whiff of caste betrayal. Long live the Brahmins!”
Janaki is quite sure Mr. Kandasamy did this because the charity’s finances are not nearly so separate from the household’s as they should be, and he would be out of a job if the charity’s foundation were eaten through. Whether this is a philosophical end gained by practical means, though, or a practical end gained by philosophical means, the results are the same.
The household returns to its former deceptive and uneasy peace. Still, Janaki continues her work, leading Sanskrit tutorials with the paadasaalai students. She has always kept busy, and work is reassuring, especially in times of change.
OTHER CHANGES ARE IMMINENT, too, but these are expected and non-threatening. Janaki, who has always perceived more than she could understand, now embodies changes she cannot control. She has intense cravings for foods that, once she has eaten them, she never wants to see or smell again. She takes long naps and has fits of crying. With joy, relief and fearful apprehension, she watches two months pass without menstruating. The estimate is that she and Baskaran will become parents in summer of 1945, and she imagines herself going to Cholapatti for a visit and returning to Pandiyoor with a child.
Now, when she’s in the women’s room, she is making items for her own child’s layette. Senior Mami has a radio; Janaki turns it on and off for her and listens to programs on current affairs and spiritual matters while doing her handiwork. She practises veena at least three or four times weekly, which is what she is doing when the telegram comes.
A paadasaalai boy peeps around the corner of the doorway to the women’s room; they ignore him. He gradually edges over so that more than half of him is visible along the doorway’s edge. Still, he is ignored. He is evidently here with a message-giving the boys small chores, everyone says patronizingly, is a way of making the pupils feel included in the family.
The boy, a jug-headed child of six with attention problems, starts to fidget and rustle, but Janaki doesn’t notice, over the music. Finally, Swarna sits up and takes the envelope out of the tyke’s hand. Senior Mami, noting the end of the standoff, immediately says, “Here.” But the sisters-in-law, lest anyone forget that they are burrs and must be plucked, and because it amuses them, have kept up their habit of disobeying their mother-in-law. Thus Swarna, hearing Senior Mami’s command, tears open the telegram.
Her eyes bulge, her jaw drops, and she gasps, “Janaki! Your sister!”
That evening, Janaki, accompanied by her husband, is on a bus bound for the town of Kumbakonam. She is wondering how much longer laughter can last in the world, now that it has been returned to its source. Like the heroine Sita, in the Ramayana, swallowed by the earth, Visalam has been taken by the giggling, gurgling River Kaveri in flood.
Janaki knows what the neighbours will be saying. There’s always someone who is taken, in every generation-the question is only who it will be and when. They all will have lost family members and will want to talk about them, and Janaki and her siblings will be forced to be polite while Visalam’s husband and children… how will they bear this loss?
Oh, how she hates the rainy season! Janaki slams the bus window’s shutter against the wet. Baskaran, at her side, says nothing. She starts weeping again and eventually falls asleep on his shoulder. In the dark, he lifts his hand to stroke her cheek and when she shifts, he brings her head to rest on his shoulder once more.
At Visalam’s family’s house, three matrons Janaki has never met rush at her, awash in tears. She feels her bile rising and dashes to bend over some bushes. Baskaran explains about the pregnancy and the ladies cluck. Janaki’s sisters and Visalam’s in-laws jockey past the strangers to take her arms, ushering her in toward a bath and sleep.
The stunned house is quiet. That’s not always the way when tragedy strikes a gregarious people. Visalam’s in-laws had loved Visalam as though she’d been born to them.
Her widower performs the necessary rites. He is in his early thirties but looks ten years older than he did the last time Janaki saw him, six months ago, his laugh lines like cuts in his gaunt face.
Saradha has come from Thiruchi; Sita from Tiruvannamalai; Laddu has brought Kamalam and Radhai from Cholapatti. He will return to Cholapatti for a week and bring Krishnan and Raghavan back for the thirteenth-day ceremony so they needn’t miss school. Vairum and Vani also arrive from Madras, in time to see Visalam’s ashes committed to the river that took her life.
The night they all gather, Sita wonders aloud if their father knows. “Does any of you have the least idea where he is?” She looks around at them, facing blank, weepy looks.
“I…” Laddu clears his throat inefficiently. “I had sent Vairum Mama a telegram asking him to inform our father. He is the only one of us who might know where he is!” he says defensively in response to several incredulous looks. “And Vairum Mama is honourable. He would have done it.”
Saradha looks at Sita with concern and says, “But maybe he didn’t.”
Kamalam bites her lip. “Or couldn’t find him.”
But the next night, when Laddu discreetly asks Vairum, Vairum assures him, “Oh, yes, I certainly did. Sent him a telegram.” Vairum smiles, softly sardonic, not without pity. “I didn’t offer to pay for his bus fare, though. He might have thought that an insult.”
“Where is he now?” Laddu asks, a bit too eagerly.
“He is very near, as it happens.” Vairum wears an even, appraising expression. “Thiruchi. Barely fifty miles.”
Laddu looks small and stammering. “And do you know he got it?”
“The telegram was sent to his home.” Vairum rises and stretches. “Presumably, he got it.” He looks around at Goli’s children, who look back at him, with Sivakami’s features, and Goli’s, and Thangam’s, and Vairum’s own, and the looks of ancestors none of them will ever know.
“Good night,” he bids them, and leaves for the chattram where he is lodged.
They are silent a while in this room they have been given, off the main hall. Everyone else is asleep. Then Sita explodes.
“Our father is a good-for-nothing! A good-for-nothing! Look at how he left us, vulnerable to Vairum Mama’s insults and jibes all these years!”
Her siblings shush her, telling her in whispers to sit, as she marches around the room, incensed.
“Vairum Mama was right! All of his slights against our father were absolutely right and I’m going to tell him so. Visalam was…” Here she gulps a little against a sob. “Visalam was a harmless soul and Appa couldn’t even come to bid her farewell. I know what you all think of me.” Saradha clucks in protest, but Sita doesn’t appear to hear, and none of her other siblings say anything. “But even I can see what an innocent soul she was. I wish he weren’t my father.”
Her siblings are surprised. None of them has felt compelled to make a declaration of the sort Sita makes the next day, to Vairum.
“Vairum Mama, I was critical of you all these years, trying to be loyal to my father. I regret that now,” she says, her voice trembling but clear. “You have done more than he ever has or will for our welfare. Thank you,” she declares, breaking down a little.
Vairum looks bemused and unabashedly triumphant. “It was, ahem…” he smiles. “It was my duty to my sister, as I saw it, and duty is an honour to uphold.”
“Yes.” Sita wags her head with martial vigour, even through tears. “It is.”
Janaki herself cannot help but contrast Baskaran’s ministrations with her father’s absence and her uncle’s passions. Baskaran stays at a guest house some ten minutes away for three days, coming to ceremonies, helping with logistics and children, offering graceful words of consolation. At the end of three days, he returns to Pandiyoor, where he is needed, but Janaki knows that he will return for the thirteenth-day ceremony.
She thinks, not for the first time, that if only he had a job and didn’t take snuff, he might be the perfect husband. When she speaks of him to Kamalam, though, as they lie side by side on their mats, taking this precious opportunity to exchange sisterly confidences, she emphasizes his faults, suspicious of the evil eye. Having seen two more households on the Pandiyoor Brahmin quarter reduced to penury through bad management of their family fortunes, she has started to wish, as her grandmother has from the start, that Baskaran were earning a regular income.
“But if he had a job,” Kamalam says, “like Saradha Akka’s and Sita Akka’s husbands, he wouldn’t be so flexible. It’s very good of him to come here and help. The old ways had their benefits.”
Janaki concedes. Baskaran is traditional in all the ways she likes: loyal to home and parents, upholding caste strictures out of deference to them, and in the interests of continuity She really shouldn’t complain.
Janaki journeys to Cholapatti shortly after the passing-on ceremony to spend some time with her grandmother. Sivakami protests that she will be fine, that Janaki shouldn’t be travelling more than necessary in her condition, but Janaki insists. Baskaran escorts her and stays three days on Gayatri’s hospitality, since protocol forbids a husband from staying in his wife’s home.
While Janaki feels proud of the simple graces of her grandmother’s home, she is also uncomfortably conscious of some differences between it and the home to which she has become accustomed. It feels a bit small and shabby; the servants are too visible and audible, too familiar and influential.
The shifting of her perceptions has been a gradual process. The first time she came home, she felt intensely nostalgic and wanted to pretend she never left. By her second visit, though, she could feel she was changing. She was shocked at Muchami calling her by her name, and he saw this, so now he doesn’t call her anything. They both realize, though they don’t speak of it, that she might have felt equally strange had he begun calling her Amma.
It was also on that visit that Mari had told her in low tones, after she had dressed, that she had forgotten her dirty clothes in a bucket in the bathroom. She rolled her eyes at her new habit, recalling how Vasantha and Swarna had laughed at her when they realized she had been washing her own clothes every day in Pandiyoor.
It irked and unsettled Janaki that she should struggle to find her place here. Even the act of getting up in the morning had become strange: at her grandmother’s house, when one rises, one clears one’s own mat, and at night, one lays it down again. In Pandiyoor, a servant clears and lays down the bedrolls. Janaki mentioned this difference to Radhai, within earshot of Mari and Muchami, pitching it in a falsely neutral tone, as though this judgment were mere observation.
Mari was rankled. “That is interesting,” she cut in, without breaking the rhythm of her work, patting fuel cakes from a pile of cow dung. She slapped the most recent onto the courtyard wall, where several rows were drying. “And do your in-laws’ servants take a bath afterward?”
Janaki blushed violently. She really had not been sure how she felt about this difference-on the one hand, she believes in upholding Brahmin practices and disapproves of any modern development that breaks down caste barriers. But the Pandiyoor customs don’t break down those practices-servants are non-Brahmins. Perhaps they aren’t polluted by sleep articles; perhaps they take a bath. How is that her business? She didn’t reply.
Through the old routines, though-setting a plate out back for the monkeys at dawn, snacking on a ball of thangai maavu in mid-afternoon, standing on the roof to watch the parrots at sunset-the small satisfactions of her childhood are returned to her, and she enjoys them, knowing she belongs somewhere else.
She is most concerned, on this visit, with making sure her grandmother is all right, following the shock of Visalam’s death. Sivakami looks lined, small and weary, the stiffness of her shoulder blades more pronounced than Janaki remembers. Suddenly awkward at being in the role of adult, Janaki tries to ask her grandmother how she is, and receives dismissive reassurances. She doesn’t know how to press through to the truth.
“Having you here is a great consolation to me,” Sivakami says. It’s after dusk and so Janaki lies with her head in her grandmother’s lap, Sivakami stroking her hair. “You must look after your health. Think peaceful thoughts. I’ll make garlic rasam for you-good for your strength, and the baby’s.”
Janaki wants to say something more, about Visalam and her untimely death, but doesn’t want to upset her grandmother, either by reminding her of their loss, or by crying, and so just quietly rests her cheek on the soft cloth over Sivakami’s bony thigh.