FOUR MONTHS LATER, Janaki is expected back in Cholapatti for her bangle ceremony. Muchami is excited about her arrival, especially since the occasion of her last visit was such an unhappy one. He misses the child she was, now no more than a ghost or vapour dancing around the woman she has become. Still, she reminds him of that long-ago child, and some of those lost, warm affections return to him in memory when he sees her.
Because Visalam’s death is still so recent, Sivakami has been anxious about the bangle ceremony: they must provide their relatives and neighbours a way to celebrate the new life while still observing grief, make Janaki feel happy and beautiful while not making her feel guilty. Kamalam, who had stayed behind in Kumbakonam to help Visalam’s in-laws with her children, arrives a few days before Janaki. Though Sivakami would never admit any such thing, Kamalam might be her favourite among the grandchildren: perfectly demure, unquestioning and capable. Sivakami feels reassured by the girl’s presence and puts her immediately to work, cooking for the feast day. Soon enough, Janaki arrives, escorted by Baskaran.
The day before the ceremony, though, some unwelcome but not unexpected information reaches Muchami via his regular channels. He had, a week or ten days earlier, put a word out requesting this information, after having seen something that didn’t quite look right.
He doesn’t go out every night as he did when he was younger but does still make his way through the woods and fields twice or three times a week, in search of other men, like him, who need physical satisfactions they cannot give or receive in their marriages. It happens that he sees things on these journeys. Some things he understands immediately; some he must work to interpret.
As has been said, the only people abroad at night are those (like Muchami, it could be argued) who have no choice. One of those who must be out is the barber who clips the heads of Brahmin widows, a work of shame and sorrow done in the dark hour favoured by demons. Sivakami has her head shaved monthly, usually by the same barber who sheared her curls in the days of her widow-making and left her light-headed under the moonlight. Now, occasionally, it is his second son who comes. The first son used to come, until his family decided he, meaning all of them, would be better off if he used his skill with a blade to get latex out of trees in Malayan plantations.
So it happened, one night, that Muchami was returning home and saw the barber’s second son entering the rear courtyard of a Brahmin-quarter widow who lives three houses over from Minister and Gayatri. He didn’t think it strange until, some ten days later, he saw the same thing again. It was then that he mentioned it to some cohorts who have now confirmed for him that the barber’s second son, Karuppan, has been coming and going from the house of the widow, Shantam, four or five nights each week. No one’s hair grows that fast.
Muchami is outraged. He stalks home as though burning the fields in his wake, like Hanuman setting Lanka alight with his tail. He knows he must decide what best to do with this information and that it might be his obligation to go to Vairum, who, as his employer and the master of a house on the Brahmin quarter, is most entitled to know and take action. He is in Cholapatti this week. But Muchami is not convinced that Vairum will do what must be done: he has never shown caste loyalty; if anything, he acts as though it would please him to see the entire Brahmin quarter in ruin. And if he tells Vairum and Vairum does nothing, it will be much more difficult then to redress this ill.
He decides to call a conference. He invites Minister and Murthy to come to Sivakami’ s house after tiffin. He tells Vairum not to go to play tennis. He tells Sivakami only that the others will be coming, not why. He is trembling at the impropriety of it. This is the sort of thing about which he could gossip to Sivakami were it to have happened several villages away. But so close to home, to the home whose honour it is his dearest duty to uphold?
That morning, the bangle ceremony is held for Janaki. Every woman on the Brahmin quarter pushes a pair of glass bangles onto Janaki’s wrists, until her arms are covered nearly to the elbows. Sivakami watches from behind the kitchen door, smiling at Janaki’s face, at the auspicious tinkling of the bangles, worn until the birth. Some women pull the bangles off in labour, as a way to distract themselves from the pain or count down the time until it is over. She catches sight of her own bare wrist on the door, the skin loose and wrinkled, and tucks her arm under her pallu.
That afternoon, Murthy and Minister arrive for the conference within minutes of each other. Vairum lounges suspiciously in the hall. Muchami has been pacing from courtyard to garden, and now sees them. Sivakami takes a position behind the nearly closed double doors in the pantry between the hall and kitchen. Muchami has told the children they must stay in the courtyard or go out to play, that he will beat them if he catches them listening. It seems to have worked, though he doesn’t see Janaki, out of sight in the room under the stairs: she doesn’t consider herself a child, doesn’t fear a beating from Muchami, and is curious.
Now Muchami, standing in the door to the garden, tells them what he knows.
Murthy begins immediately to splutter and shake. Minister looks circumspect and deeply troubled.
How it came about they wonder but have no idea. Maybe Karuppan forced her, the first time, and has been blackmailing her. Or Shantam, the widow, may have permitted it all along. She is a sullen and feisty type. She and her husband had loud, frequent fights in the years of their marriage, and she has had loud, frequent fights with her in-laws since he died. One of Gayatri’s regular jokes is about the fact that this woman’s name means “peace”-what would she have been like if her name had meant “hot-tempered”?
Vairum looks exasperated.
“What concern is this of mine?” he asks Muchami, and then looks at the others to see if they can answer. “Let her bring shame on her own head and her house.”
“No, son.” Minister cradles his forehead in his forefinger and thumb. It looks as if someone gave him a gun and he can’t decide how to use it. “He is the criminal in this situation. A woman’s virtue is that of her family, and he has destroyed it, whether or not she chooses each night to open her door.”
“I-I-I can’t even-how-understand, how you c-c-can both still be sitting and t-talking!” Murthy has leapt from his chair. “Open her door! I-I-I’ll open his head, that’s what!” He is running for the door now, his hands over his ears. “Ugh! Ogh! My ears are poisoned by what I have heard today!” He stumbles in an attempt to mount the two or three steps to his own veranda, and succumbs to an attack of asthma, whereupon a few passersby stop to ask what is wrong. He tells them.
Janaki wants desperately to go to her grandmother and console her. Sivakami is so restrained in her behaviour and outlook that Janaki imagines news of such an atrocity would shake her to the core. Really, though, she wants reassurance as much as she wants to give it.
That night, Shantam’s nearest neighbours’ servants are posted in the brush beyond her courtyard gate. The unlucky lover arrives. He pushes open the door, enters, closes it behind him. Each of the servants slips from his hiding place. Each goes to the door of the house he serves and tells his employer that the barber is inside. Each goes to the next house and tells the master of that house. Moments pass and from each house emerges its master. Each master carries a big stick.
What is the barber’s second son thinking? He must be about seventeen, she about twice his age, plump and fair, while he is dark as rosewood. Sivakami thinks of them as she does her beading, working fast, very fast. She hears one of the servants knock on their door to inform Vairum that the moment has come for action. Muchami, who is spending the night in the courtyard, tells him Vairum will not come because Vairum said he will have nothing to do with this nonsense, that mobs always chase phantoms, that he has to work in the morning, unlike these professional moralists in search of a night’s entertainment. Minister also will not participate, because of possible political repercussions. There are more than enough hands, anyway-more than fifteen pairs, all holding sticks, heading for the house, the third rough-hewn gate east of Gayatri’s.
Did he force her? Sivakami wonders. But why didn’t she just bar the door and not permit him to come again? Could he really have blackmailed her? She would have been defiled and disgraced, but better that than going through it night after night, no? Unless she really did choose this…
Sivakami can barely bring herself to think it. A barber, one of the worst classes of untouchables. A Brahmin woman choosing to be with a barber. Sivakami casts her mind back to the years of her marriage and remembers, vividly still because barely a night has passed in forty years when she hasn’t thought about the acts of love she and her husband performed with each other. She can’t help it: her mind begins to imagine Shantam and the barber’s son in these poses, and she shudders, disgusted, but her mind keeps picturing it. She tries to keep the bile down and her mind clear by concentrating on the image she is working in beads, Lord Krishna at Bhutana’s poisoned breast. It doesn’t work. She runs outside and vomits.
Janaki, lying in the main hall with her siblings, hears her grandmother go out back and rises to meet her in the kitchen.
“Do you want a cup of water, Amma?” she asks.
“I’m fine, child.” Sivakami dippers herself a cup and drinks. “Go back to sleep.”
Dimly, they hear the sound of shouting, getting closer.
“I heard, Amma,” Janaki confesses. “I know.”
Sivakami sighs, and shakes her head, then draws Janaki down to sit beside her. “Pray with me. You mustn’t think about such terrible matters, not in your condition. Good girl.” She takes out her beads and begins the mantra she repeats one thousand and one times daily. Janaki joins in chorus.
Karuppan has closed the door but not drawn the heavy bolt. He never does, why should he? Shantam is waiting for him on the wooden bench on the back of the house where she is made to sleep. She hates sleeping there, but each of the bedrooms is now taken up with one of her late husband’s brothers. Each of them is married now, and so they need private rooms. She could sleep in a corner of the main hall with the children, but it’s her mother-in-law’s prerogative and she wants Shantam to sleep outside. Shantam makes up for it in small cruelties toward her nephews and nieces, and even, sometimes, toward her own children.
She is sitting, waiting for him on her bench. He crosses to her on silent feet. Her sari has already slipped from her head and now he unwinds it from her shoulders and buries his face in the soft flesh between her collarbone and breast, stroking his lips and eyelids across the pillow of silky, fragrant skin. She is so unlike the women of his class-not that he has had one yet, but he can tell. They stand and walk past the cowshed into the garden, her sari beginning already to unwrap. They pull it after themselves and spread it on the garden floor. And when the enraged men burst into the courtyard and run from there into the garden, this is what they see: the widow trying to wrap herself back into the white sari that has been serving as her illicit conjugal bed, and the glistening form of the barber’s second son, reaching the top of the garden wall and jumping down off it.
By now, Shantam’s mother-in-law and other family members, who had not been informed about the raid, have flung open numerous internal doors. Some of the men run through the house to the front and start shouting for those doors to be unlocked, while others have already run back out and through the neighbours’ houses onto the Brahmin-quarter street, to see which way the scoundrel is going. Every woman on the street, except Sivakami and Janaki, is witness to the flight of the naked and terrified boy, who streaks straight up the Brahmin quarter, whistled along by the wind of the matrons’ gasps.
The men give chase. They chase him far, through bramble and brooks. He is much faster than they, but two send their servants on bicycles to cut him off. He is caught. These weak, pulpy Brahmins, worked up by the chase, beat Karuppan very badly. Muchami helps in the chase but participates only a little in the beating.
Shantam is also chastised and lightly beaten by her mother-in-law, in front of her children and all her brothers- and sisters-in-law.
These are the events of that night. After the shouting mob passes and the sound fades away, Sivakami tells Janaki to go back to sleep.
Sivakami resumes her beading. She hears the men return and go to their homes. Muchami comes back, too, and tells her what happened. Then he lies down in the courtyard to sleep. She closes the kitchen doors, goes into the pantry and closes those doors, too. She lies where she normally lies. She is calmer but can feel the horrible images trying to re-form in her mind’s eye. She tries to banish them again, and images of her husband-his skin sliding against hers, the smoothness of his back where she gripped it, her fingertips notching his spine-slip in with distressing ease to replace those of the barber’s son, who is just a few years younger than Hanumarathnam was when he died. Sivakami doesn’t permit herself to move-she lies, as every night, on her side, on the cool floor of the pantry, her neck on a wooden rest-but shifts her legs minutely against that delicious discomfort that now can never be eased. She had almost managed to forget that gnaw and tickle, brushed it away with busyness and prayer. The advance of age was a relief: in the last ten years, the craving has begun to diminish. Now her chest feels thick with anger at Shantam for having reminded her.
Shantam has been a widow for less than ten years, less than ten years feeling no touch save that of her children, and even that only after sunset-and Shantam’s not even permitted to sleep with them. Sivakami recalls her first years of widowhood, when she slept curled around Vairum, the warm pressure of his milk-smelling, dream-twitching, little-boy body anchoring her to her own body, which seemed, in daylight, not to exist at all.
Sivakami wraps her arms around herself, biting her lip. She knows what Shantam has endured. But it is their lot to endure. If not, why else does Sivakami live as she does? What appeal is there in a topsy-turvy world and what place does a widow have, if not this one?
Janaki, sleepless among the children, desperately misses Baskaran. She could talk with him about this, as she can with no one else, and he would hold her and help her think of other things. What if she never sees him again? What if he dies before she returns? She would never again be touched. It would be like her childhood all over again.
She had never before thought beyond her grandmother’s sacrifice and righteousness. She believed in everything Sivakami believed but never thought of her grandmother as sharing her feelings. I’m exactly the age Amma was when she was widowed, she realizes. How did she bear it?
Janaki wants to share the village’s anger at Shantam’s breach, but, in the grip now of this strange pity for the girl her grandmother was, she is unable. She, in Sivakami’s position, might well have gone mad.
At first light the next morning, a bullock solemnly pulls a cart down the Brahmin quarter from Shantam’s house toward Kulithalai (most bullocks look solemn, this one especially so). On the cart are two men and a big load of hay from which they are creating a wake, systematically depositing large handfuls behind them on the path and roadway. When this is done, a priest from the Brahmin-quarter temple drops three lumps of burning camphor at the edge of the straw carpet, which begins where Karuppan landed after vaulting Shantam’s wall. Three palms of flame grow fingers, join hands and run up the Brahmin quarter. Where the fire hits a pocket of damp, it pops and hisses much like the good Brahmin folk of the village waiting for the street to be purified so that they can meet and rehash the night’s events. When the veil of smoke lifts, the carpet of straw has magically changed into one of ash, with little straw bits here and there, and the Brahmin quarter, too, has been magically restored to its former untouchability, which the untouchable robbed by his touch.
That morning, at Sivakami’s, Gayatri expresses perfunctory regret about the beatings but is philosophical.
“It’s terrible, it really is, but what could they have expected?”
Minister has contacted a French mission doctor of his acquaintance, who would go and see the boy today.
Gayatri notices Mari scrubbing pots with extraordinary vigour and asks what she thinks.
“Such liaisons must be stopped!” Mari retorts in a tone of voice that implies she is more offended at Gayatri having felt the need to ask than at the subject of the question.
“Clearly, yes, clearly,” Gayatri mutters, taking offence at Mari’s tone.
Young Kesavan enters shaking his head and clucking his tongue.
“Why, why, why, why, why…” He shakes his head.
People so often think something becomes more profound if repeated. Sometimes it does.
“Why don’t Brahmins permit widow remarriage?” he asks.
This is not what Sivakami and Janaki expected to hear.
“I think it is terribly wrong, what they did,” he continues, because this is how he feels and because he would hate to lose this job due to some misapprehension of his position on Sivakami’s part. “But if widows were permitted to remarry and if we could rid ourselves of this terrible caste prejudice, maybe this would not have been necessary for them.”
“This was not necessary for them,” Sivakami starts, and Kesavan replies, “Oh, yes.”
“And remarriage?” she continues. “What is this ‘remarriage’? Marriage is something that can only happen once.”
“But men are permitted another wife,” Kesavan says, after a slight, ingratiating, pause.
“If the first wife does not complete him. If there is no child,” Sivakami splutters. “But then it was not really a marriage, so the second is really the first. Or if there are children who need a mother.”
Janaki watches her grandmother. She has never seen her angry like this. Her convictions are what sustained her, Janaki thinks. How dare Vairum Mama try to challenge her on her beliefs? They are the reason she is alive.
No one ever knows Shantam’s opinion on the subject, because she disappears the next day, taking with her jewels-those that should have been her daughter‘s-and six silk saris belonging to her sisters-in-law. She is never seen in Cholapatti again. From time to time a rumour floats back: Shantam seen in Thanjavur, thinner and darker, living with a pearl fisherman and selling pearls on the harbour road. Shantam, cheeks and ears pierced with tridents, hair grown matted and coiled atop her half-mad head, running up to pilgrims in the Palani temple and telling their fortunes whether they want them or not. Shantam, fatter and fairer, living in Benares, masquerading as a wealthy Parsee widow running a charity home for destitute or abandoned Brahmin widows. None of the rumours is ever corroborated.
Karuppan, the barber’s second son, needs surgery and is taken to the French mission hospital to have it done, but by then he has been bleeding internally for ten or twelve hours, so it’s too late and he dies. At the beginning of the following year, the company employing Karuppan’s older brother fails. It’s a bad time for rubber, and for companies generally. He is sent home on a ship that gets caught in a typhoon and founders on some rocks. If there are survivors, he is not among them. His parents have now lost both of their sons. They never have grandchildren. Their older son’s widow, as is not uncommon in their community, remarries.
The elder barber goes back to shaving the heads of all his customers. Perhaps he still says “I’m sorry,” as he did to Sivakami, before shaving a Brahmin widow’s head for the first time.
Perhaps not.