IN THE MONTHS LEADING UP TO HER DEPARTURE for Madras, Sivakami replays for herself again and again the moment when Vairum told her he and Vani would be parents once more, as though it is a prayer bead on the string she tells daily.
After his oblation for the Ramar, he had turned to her with a speed and intensity she found alarming, his eyes burning. She recalls that alarm now with amusement, and also remembers the warmth and the good humour of his glance. It made her shiver.
“We are going to have need of your services,” he had said, after making the announcement. “You know I have no truck with superstition, but Vani has insisted that she will have no doctors and that your kai raasi must deliver our child. I don’t have the power to deny her anything she wants.” He threw his arms up happily, then continued in a softer, tenderer tone. “Since her mother died, there is no reason for her to go to Pandiyoor for childbirth and, in any case, she has always felt that you are as a mother to her.”
Janaki had listened to the exchange with wonder mixed with relief: if Vairum was acceding to Vani’s wish for Sivakami’s lucky hands, he couldn’t object to hers! And now she need not feel self-conscious at the blessing of her child: Vairum and Vani’s witness will be an especially happy one. What marvellous news!
She and Kamalam talk about it that night as Janaki nurses her daughter. Vairum and Vani so needed this. Janaki is sure that if Sivakami delivers the child, it will be strong and healthy, though she is still concerned for Vani, who looked so ill so recently, and is thrity-five, an advanced age for child-bearing.
They agree that Sivakami should come to Madras a few months before the birth, to cook and care for Vani the way a mother would.
Kamalam will return to Visalam’s in-laws’ house. They have been clamouring for her to come back, especially Visalam’s children, who have grown very attached. Saradha, who is well settled in Thiruchi, will look after the rest of her younger siblings there. She has a daughter a year older than Radhai, and Vairum had intended that Krishnan and Raghavan would soon go live in Thiruchi in any case, to attend English-medium schools there. Sita is pregnant and Vairum has invited her to come to Madras instead of Cholapatti for her delivery. Laddu still lives with his grandmother in Cholapatti and cannot leave: he has now been given responsibility for a rice mill. He will board at the chattram in Kulithalai, where he will have meals and company, as long as Sivakami is away.
Although there is little in her affairs that she needs to wrap up-Muchami will look after the tenants as usual and Vairum comes once a month or so-there is one matter she wants safeguarded. She entrusts a biscuit tin of completed beadwork pieces to Gayatri, those that are still requested, every month or two, by Brahmins along the quarter whose daughters are about to give birth. Sivakami still has never spoken of it to Vairum and has no reason to believe he knows.
She will take with her the scene she is at work on now: Krishna dancing on the five hoods of the monster cobra. This scene should be finished before Vani gives birth. Apart from that, she packs a satchel of snacks she has made as a gift for Vairum and Vani, and another, much smaller one, containing her spare sari, her copy of the Kamba-Ramanayanam, between whose pages she has stowed five ten-rupee notes, her beadwork and the small brass water jug she always drinks from, so as not to have to share a vessel.
MUCHAMI IS EXCITED FOR HER, but also concerned: Vairum is so unconventional. What if he forces Sivakami to do things that make her uncomfortable? She is not young any more, he thinks, as he weaves thatch to repair the cowshed roof. The least Vairum can do is permit her her ways.
He tears a piece of thatch by pulling it too hard and realizes he has been getting angry with Vairum before anything has even happened. He certainly did look happy, and Vani looked better than she has in years. Maybe their contentment and gratitude for Sivakami’s help will soften Vairum’s radical edge.
He wonders how he will fill his days while she is gone.
“It will be quiet around here,” he remarks to her late one morning.
His routine has altered considerably. He no longer has a child to look after, and Mari has been having health problems for the last year or two. She has been increasingly nervous and irritable, prone to dropping things and occasionally fainting. Sivakami has relieved her of many of her duties. Though he looks in during the day to make sure she’s all right, Muchami prefers to leave their hut to her.
“Maybe I should go in for some other work: start a business. Can you see me in import-export?”
Sivakami laughs over the vegetables she is cutting. “You could do anything you want. Yes, I suppose the house hasn’t been left empty since I went to live with my brothers-what’s that, forty years ago?”
“A lifetime.” Muchami walks to the garden door to spit a stream of betel juice into the growth.
“How did you stay busy back then?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, trying to remember. “It was easier when one was young. There was always activity at the market, gossip, scandals, friends needing help.” He doesn’t mention midnight liaisons that occasionally left him fatigued during the day: an extra hour for siesta was a welcome thing. He still indulges, but only very occasionally. “The properties also needed more managing then, before Vairum organized them all. Life starts to run itself after a while.”
“You should rest up while I’m gone. Vairum may not want to come here so much when he has a child, and the first year, things may fall into some disarray. You will be useful then.”
“Yes, it could happen.” He smiles at her, feeling nervous. Is he only fearful of how Vairum might treat her there, so far away from her routines and the village she knows? No, there’s something else: “Amma, when you go, do a ritual over Vani against the evil eye.”
Sivakami stops slicing okra and looks at him.
“I am afraid,” he tells her, and it’s true. He is chilled to the bone at the prospect of what might happen if this pregnancy doesn’t succeed.
“You are right,” she says, allowing herself to feel the fear she had suppressed with her own happiness. “I will do it, yes.”
It’s 7 a.m. when Vairum comes to fetch her in his new car, a red Buick sedan. She has been ready and waiting for a couple of hours, sitting in the door to the pantry while Muchami keeps her company from the courtyard. Vairum stops at the house only long enough for a drink of water. He has to draw it at the well because the big clay water pot in the pantry is drained and turned upside down.
“Ready, Amma?”
The house already has an empty feel, the shutters closed, the children gone. Sivakami begins locking all the doors in the house, from back to front, and Muchami goes through the garden to stand on the street beside the car to await his final instructions. Alone, Sivakami does a final oblation for the Ramar, thinking of the two other times she has performed a farewell for these gods: before going to her brothers’ house and before going to Munnoor when Thangam died. She prays, innocent and hearty, that all should go well in Madras, stifling a moth-wing flutter of worry. Muchami was quite right to remind her to do a ritual against dhrishti.
She locks the front door behind her, inserts the key carefully into her travel bundle, and turns, feeling self-conscious, to the car, which has attracted a crowd. Vairum takes the bag of snacks with a small, sardonic grin as the uniformed driver holds the door open. Sivakami mounts the running board and enters the cavern of the car’s back seat. It is a rare sunny day in November, the height of the rainy season, and the air inside the car has congealed into a warm stillness. Vairum is lending his ear to a man in the crowd who seems to have a proposal. The neighbours and children press in a bit closer, their interest renewed by seeing Sivakami within the car. Gayatri and Minister are here, too, waving cheerily, but Sivakami, feeling uncomfortably like a bride in this red chariot, can’t smile back. She’s a little irritated at being made the subject of a spectacle. It is inappropriate, but she couldn’t expect Vairum to sympathize with that. Finally, Vairum enters the car. He settles himself on the grey upholstered seat while the driver closes the door and runs around the front to start the car.
It takes them some twelve hours to reach Madras, during which time Sivakami takes no food or water-no food because she eats nothing she hasn’t cooked herself, nor water because she will only drink that reserved for Brahmins. Vairum and his driver eat at a grand restaurant in Pondicherry, where Vairum has a meeting. She waits for them in the car, watching the gawkers cluster, again, into a crowd. The gleaming, showy vehicle would have drawn an audience anyhow, but the sight of an orthodox Brahmin widow tucked inside inspires comments. Sivakami unwinds her prayer beads from her wrist and says mantras until Vairum returns.
He is silent for most of the journey. For a brief time, following the meeting, he looks over some papers, and he takes a short nap. Otherwise, he stares out his window and she out hers. She imagines the quiet between them is companionable, that they are both lost in the same rosy visions of the months and years to come-but he doesn’t say and she doesn’t really know what he is thinking.
It is after eight o’clock when they reach Madras. The city welters up around them, almost before Sivakami realizes it has. The houses on Vairum’s street look, to Sivakami, grand enough to be government offices. In the car port, the driver opens her door, and she follows Vairum’s striding form up the stairs, yearning to be invisible as she feels his employees’ discreetly curious eyes. Upstairs, she creeps along the narrow balcony, keeping her gaze on the floor. In the outdoor reception area, Vani falls at her feet and ushers her through the majestic carved wooden doors into the sitting room. The black and white tiles are cool, like taut silk. Sivakami’s callused feet make slapping sounds that ring in the airy room’s besieged hush-the quiet of a house sheltered from traffic noise by tall trees and a serious class differential. The sound of her feet against the brick of the Cholapatti floor was immediately dulled by the roughness of the floor, and the sounds of the village, always entering without leave.
She is so happy to see Vani, especially with the glow of expectancy lighting her rounded features. She appears cheerful and girlish as she shows Sivakami around, a terrific contrast with her appearance in recent years. She is about six months along and is significantly heavier, an effect enhanced by her nine-yard sari. But one would not guess Vani was pregnant from her figure, Sivakami thinks with some satisfaction: all the better to protect her from the evil eye.
Vani leads her to her room. She is not sure she likes this: a room of her own. It has one set of narrow double doors leading onto the rear courtyard, and another leading onto the sitting room. It seems inappropriate to her, excessive, for a lonely widow to take up an entire room, but she puts her Ramayana and extra sari in a wall-niche cupboard, along with her beading, and follows Vani out into the courtyard, in the centre of which is a well and a depression for washing dishes. This feels relatively familiar. The toilet and bath stalls are in the far corner. No more four-in-the-morning-blue-air dips in the Kaveri, she realizes. Will she really feel clean without sand encrusting her feet? From the courtyard, Vani shows her into the kitchen, where Vairum has deposited the satchel of snacks. It has a second set of doors onto a dining room, and a third, onto a rear puja room.
Sivakami takes water-the first she has drunk all day-pouring it from the brass jug down her throat without touching the jar to her lips, and then bathes and performs oblations for the gods in Vairum’s puja room. Taking up a fistful of salt, she beckons Vani, making sure Vairum doesn’t see, and circles her three times each way with the fist, saying the familiar curses under her breath. “May your eyes burst open if anything happens to this child.” She looks around, unsure of where to throw evil-eye-soaked salt in a house without a canal out back. Vani points to the bathroom.
She turns next to familiarizing herself with the kitchen so she can cook herself a meal. So this is what it feels like to be so near the sea she has never seen, she thinks: the air itself clings like damp cloth. She finds herself waving her hand in front of her face as though she has walked through a cobweb; she finds the cupboard contents limp and sticky. She greets the servant couple from Cholapatti. The man has been given other chores, since Sivakami will do most of the cooking while she is here, but the woman remains to help with washing, peeling and chopping, and Sivakami shyly asks her how to use the stove.
Vairum has never told Sivakami anything about his work. Sometimes she has asked Muchami questions, and he has explained what he understood, based on gossip and on his observations as he accompanied Vairum in the field. She understands Vairum has a reputation for fairness and has earned a great deal of respect from both their tenants and his factory workers in the Kulithalai Taluk. She knows he had dealings with non-Brahmins but doesn’t believe he will bring them into his house. Janaki and Kamalam had sworn to her, on returning from their Madras visit, that they ate no cooked food in non-Brahmin houses. It didn’t occur to Sivakami to ask whether non-Brahmins ate food in Vairum’s house. What is the purpose of soiling himself thus? He eats in restaurants-can’t he just meet them there?
The first time it happens, she is convulsed with disgust: she has cooked this food and Vairum and Vani are sitting together with three of those people, in plain view of those people, polluted by their gaze. She never shows herself in front of guests, Brahmin or non-Brahmin; the cook serves. But she glimpsed them as they entered-dark-skinned, evidently wealthy-and could hear them, using inflections and terms foreign to Brahmins, and imagined them eating the food she had prepared. She crouches in the door between the kitchen and puja room, feeling ill. The crowning insult is when they cut through the kitchen to the courtyard to wash their hands-they enter the kitchen! On their way back to the sitting room, they stop to compliment her lavishly on the food, mortifying her with their lack of manners.
That night, she performs purification ceremonies, waving camphor and muttering prayers, to make the kitchen usable again. The next day, unable to help herself, she tries to talk to Vairum about the breach.
“Kanna, I have heard that non-Brahmins are very fond of our food,” she opens, timidly. “But shouldn’t you consider Vani’s feelings?”
Vairum snorts, looking amused. “What are you saying, Amma?”
“Vani is a good wife-she can’t tell you this herself, and would never disobey you,” she presses gently. “But you shouldn’t make her eat with those… with non-Brahmins, kanna.”
“Vani no more believes in such artificial distinctions than I do, Amma,” he says sharply. “We keep Brahmin cooks only because they prepare food in the style we are accustomed to and like-not because we subscribe to your outmoded provincial prejudices. Got that?”
Sivakami is defenceless. Hanumarathnam never spoke rudely like this to anyone. Vairum is more polite to his peons than to his mother. How has she lost her son to a world turned upside-down? Was it for this that she educated him? Perhaps she should have kept him in the paadasaalai, she resorts to thinking, briefly indignant. At least he would have valued his Brahminhood then, even if his caste status were the only thing he had to be proud of.
In December, Sita arrives for her delivery, bringing her elder daughter and twin sons. Kamalam and Janaki also come, Kamalam to help Sita, and Janaki for company. Everyone but the expectant mother is accommodated in the guest quarters below. Sivakami’s room becomes a birthing chamber and Sivakami relocates to the kitchen floor, where she feels significantly more at ease than she did taking up a room all on her own. Vani’s nieces hold a bangle ceremony for her, and now the merry tinkle of glass mingles with her music when she plays, along with the sisters’ chatter and the clamour of their children.
“It’s like being back in the village!” Sivakami overhears Vairum telling Sita’s husband, at the eleventh-day ceremony. “In the best sense, of course. Nothing like the sound of children’s voices to gladden the heart, no?”
Sivakami sees Janaki’s expression: all of the Cholapatti clan present for the ceremony are painfully aware that he has not always felt like this about the sound of children.
Visalam’s in-laws come for the ceremony also, with a proposal for Vairum: the year of mourning for Visalam has ended and Kamalam is now eligible for marriage. She is already part of the household, they say; there’s no sense in breaking the family bond. The children need a mother and she has proven already that she can be that to them.
Kamalam acts surprised and embarrassed, but it is clear to all of them how comfortable she has felt at her future in-laws’ house. Vairum happily accepts.
That afternoon, Vani plays a short concert for the guests. Sivakami disapproves and again makes the mistake, as Vani settles herself, of telling Vairum, “I am surprised you are not concerned about exposing her to the evil eye. She is almost eight months pregnant!”
“Oh, is she?” Vairum arches an eyebrow with consummate sarcasm. “I never would have known! Thank you for telling me, Amma! Oh, my, my wife is nearly eight months pregnant!”
Sivakami withdraws, humiliated, to the kitchen, where Janaki is stirring tapioca pudding on the stove for Sita’s children.
“Is she well?” Janaki asks, a faint prying note in her voice. “One would hardly believe Vani Mami is pregnant.”
It’s true: Vani is nearing her due date and no larger than she was when Sivakami arrived in Madras.
“She is ready to be a mother!” Sivakami answers, sounding stiff. “Sometimes, when Sita’s baby girl cries, Vani’s breasts begin dripping so, so! The front of her sari gets soaked!”
“Oh, listen!” Janaki says. “She’s playing ‘Jaggadhodharana’! It brings me straight back to Cholapatti, Amma, that sound. Next summer, we’ll all gather there, all the cousins, and Vani Mami will bring her child, and we can all look after it while she plays.”
Sita’s children swarm into the kitchen, whining for tapioca, and Janaki leads them out into the dining room.
DECEMBER BLEEDS INTO JANUARY, January creeps away and February swells into fullness, but Vani does not go into labour. She exhibits all the torpor and discomfort of advanced pregnancy, as though her burden is too great to bear and too precious to pass on, but she looks no bigger.
Sivakami is a patient woman, but she’s not accustomed to waiting so long for this particular gratification. Gayatri, who had planned to come for the baby’s naming ceremony, finally comes anyway, nearly two months after Vani’s supposed due date.
“What on earth is going on?” she whispers loudly, as Sivakami serves her coffee in the kitchen. Vani is playing her veena in the sitting room, providing them with a cover of sound. “She’s not pregnant, is she?”
“Of course she is.” Sivakami combines the decoction with milk and sugar, pouring it from tumbler to bowl to mix it. “They must have miscalculated, miscounted.”
“How long has it been since she last had her period?”
“I can’t ask that,” Sivakami responds reasonably, setting the coffee down in front of Gayatri and fetching biscuits.
“Have they seen a doctor?”
“I should hope not,” Sivakami ejects, tartly indignant.
After a pause, Gayatri says, “I’m going to ask.”
When Vani, after playing, comes into the kitchen for a drink of water, Gayatri beckons her.
“Come, dear.” She pats the place beside her, and Vani plumps herself down awkwardly. “You look exhausted. I know all too well what it is like to be in this stage-every day seems like an eternity. Tell me, though: when did you last have your period?”
Vani frowns and looks away.
“Come now. You don’t want this to go too long. It’s not healthy for the baby, nor for you. You know there are remedies to help the baby along. Shall I find out about some for you?”
“No doctors,” Vani says loudly, and Gayatri startles.
“Has Vairum taken you to any doctors?” Gayatri inquires.
“No,” Vani says emphatically, and Sivakami thinks she can imagine the scenes between them.
“I have in mind traditional remedies,” Gayatri says soothingly, and Vani looks more interested and less wary.
“But you don’t want to take them too early-it’s important to know that your baby is fully matured,” Gayatri explains. “When did you have your last period?”
Vani purses her lips. Gayatri sighs.
After some long minutes, Vani replies. “April.”
“April…” Gayatri counts off on her fingers. “So you might have been due as late as February. Let’s give it another week and I’ll see if my daughter-in-law knows anyone who can compound what you need.”
Through March, the weather grows hot, and the atmosphere in the house feels oppressive. Gayatri secures and brings several herbal composites, which Sivakami prepares, boiling five roots in water for ten minutes, mixing the resulting decoction into milk and giving it to Vani to drink on an empty stomach. Vani follows the regime for three days, until Vairum learns of it and throws the herbalist’s packets out the window of the kitchen.
“How dare you endanger our child with this witchcraft?” he asks. “I brought you here at Vani’s insistence, but if I catch you again doing anything to jeopardize this pregnancy…” He leaves the threat unspoken.
Sivakami hasn’t slept much since her arrival in Madras, and she lies awake for a week of nights after the confrontation, desiccated by sorrow. How could he think she would do anything to endanger the grandchild she wants, as she would readily admit, more than any of the others? A son of her son, a son of her son…
April bloats, May bursts-and still no child. Sivakami was to have returned to Cholapatti by now-she has been putting off her grandchildren, who all expected to convene in their natal home for the school holidays. It has become a tradition for those with school-age children to return, for the cousins to sleep together in the hall, play together near the canal, visit Gayatri’s grandchildren in gangs and meet other children of their age on the Brahmin quarter. And now there are the three youngest ones in Thiruchi, whom she is missing.
She cautiously broaches the subject with Vairum, who has become increasingly preoccupied and busy of late.
“I don’t see how you can go,” he replies, without looking up from the paper he is reading on the divan, “but they are welcome to come here.”
Janaki and Kamalam decide against coming, not wanting to crowd, and having visited so recently, but Saradha brings her family, as well as Radhai, Krishnan and Raghavan, who are thrilled to have the chance to see the city. Vairum makes a car available to them, though Saradha spends most of her time with Sivakami. Janaki had come to see her eldest sister the week prior and has sent a large packet of holy ash, along with a letter.
My husband had to go and consult a seer. Two of our tenants’ plows were stolen, and they asked him to investigate. So he went to this man we heard of who has a very high reputation. The man told my husband: you will find your missing items in two separate places, one high, one low, but equidistant from the river. Seek and you will find. And it was true! But I also had him ask what is wrong with Vani Mami. The man said exactly this: “Your relative has a baby within her whose soul’s growth is being stunted by the evil eye. Take this holy ash, and tell her to rub it on her belly daily as an antidote. Within a year, the baby will grow.”
Sivakami thinks that surely Vairum cannot see holy ash as in any way harmful to the child-he is not superstitious but he is religious. But when, two months later, Janaki writes to her to say that the seer was arrested for leading a burglary ring-his henchmen would steal agricultural implements and he would collect money from the owners for describing how to find them-Sivakami discreetly tells Vani to discontinue this treatment also.
When August blooms like an foul-smelling flower, Vani is still acting elephantine with expectancy, though she has gained no more weight. If anything, she may have lost some, and has begun once more to look dull and drawn, as she did in the long, empty years before her pregnancy. Nearly all the glass bangles she received have broken, a bad omen, but who ever wears them this long? The lonely chime of those few remaining sounds like the dregs of misplaced hope. Vairum’s overinflated good humour has fizzled; he is short with his staff and talks to Sivakami as though she is a nuisance.
Gayatri, whose Madras son has had a child, visits, and Sivakami broaches the topic with her, saying Vairum has twice brought doctors to the house, but that Vani refuses to be seen by them.
“Akka,” Gayatri sighs, and looks away. “Vani’s pregnancy is not advancing because she is not pregnant. Something else may be wrong with her-early menopause? I don’t know. But she’s not… pregnant.”
Is Gayatri suggesting Vani has been lying? Why would she do that?
“I’m not saying she’s lying,” Gayatri continues in a gentle tone. “I… I’ve never heard of something like this from a woman. But it happens, with animals. I remember my brother’s dog acted completely-”
“Really, Gayatri,” Sivakami shouts at her friend. Comparison to a dog is one of the grand insults. “Sometimes you just go too far.”
“Please, Akka, don’t take me wrong,” Gayatri protests, “I’m sorry.”
But Sivakami is furious and they part awkwardly.
Sivakami putters around the kitchen in a rage, prepares meals and goes through the motions of her day, before finally, in the depth of night, acknowledging that, of all the possible explanations, this one makes the most sense. She is surprised that Vairum, with his reverence for reason and science, has not seen it before now. Maybe he has and is not admitting it. The ways of the heart are obscure, though: how can he give up this hope? He can’t.
But if they can help Vani, perhaps they can still have a child? That is another question. Sivakami, exhausted by the effort logic demands from her, nods off over her beading.
“But she’s in exactly the same condition now that she was a year ago.”
Did she say that? She didn’t mean to. She didn’t mean it.
Yes, she did.
“Go,” he says.
Sivakami straightens and dizzies. She doesn’t understand.
“Go,” Vairum says again.
His meaning is becoming clearer.
“As always with you, it’s about appearances. I don’t know why I gave in to Vani’s begging for you to come,” he growls. “A Brahmin widow in the city-you have done everything possible since you arrived to hold yourself apart. I can see the blame in your eyes, always that blame.”
“No, it’s not true.” She doesn’t sound sincere, though she is. She has never blamed him-what does he think she would blame him for?
“Go home. You’ll never have to look at a non-Brahmin again, except for Muchami and Mari, who will cower for you in the courtyard.”
“I will stay.”
What about Vani? Can’t he see something is wrong?
“No. You will go.” He pulls her clean sari down from the drying rod, goes to the shelves of her room, takes out her few belongings and pulls a wad of cash from his pocket. His eyes are white and desperate.
“I… I want you to have children!” she cries, stumbling toward him in desperation of her own.
“We will.” He pushes her effects and the money at her.
“Ten children!” She echoes the prophecy he made when he decided on this marriage.
“Go.” He means it.
Vani, in the sitting room, has broken off in the middle of her playing. Sivakami gives her the last square of beadwork she completed- Krishna surrounded by milkmaids-and lays a hand on the crown of Vani’s head. She need not remain madi if she is about to travel. Vani grasps her hand, so hard that Sivakami nearly falls, and lays her cheek in Sivakami’s palm.
“You will be a mother,” Sivakami whispers and then she walks toward the door, with Vairum’s eyes on her. She expected him to precede her, to arrange the car, but she looks back, and he points to the exit.
She descends to the street and the peon, though confused, pulls open the gate for her. It is evening. She breaks a small twig from a neem tree growing at the edge of Vairum’s compound, and pushes it into her bundle, walks a few steps, and stops. This is the first time in her sixty years that she has gone anywhere alone. She feels naked, invisible, petrified. She can feel Vairum’s house behind her, as Rama must have sensed his home at his back when he was banished to the wilds, driven from his kingdom. That story has a happy ending.
She clutches for her Ramayana, inside her satchel, and forces herself to shuffle along to the busy street at the end of the cul-de-sac, where she hails a horse carriage. The driver stops but looks to either side of her and asks, “You must not be travelling alone, Amma. Where is your son, your servant, your nephew? Who is helping you?”
“No.” Sivakami clears her throat. “I am going to my village. Please, take me to the station where I can catch a train south.” She remembers that she must change trains in Thiruchi. “To Kottai,” she adds, using the traditional name to make herself sound practised.
“Yes. Yes. Sit, please.” He gestures to the carriage as his horse snorts in her frayed blue harness.
At the station, he escorts her in with a great show of respect, points out where she can get her ticket and overcharges without apology. Sivakami brought the cash Vairum gave her-she didn’t want to insult him further-but doesn’t want to use it for this journey. She extracts one of the five ten-rupee notes she pressed between the pages of her Ramayana all those months ago and pays her own way.
Though India has been bound together by the iron ribbon, most people on a train will try to keep a respectful distance from a Brahmin widow. As the cabin fills, though, this space thins to a sheet the thickness of a single molecule. Sivakami appreciates the delicacy of the dark and noisy persons to either side, who avoid eye contact with her despite their thighs pressed length to length, their shoulder blades fitted together like parts of a rice mill. These non-Brahmins clearly have not yet been infected by that intimacy shown by Vairum’s associates, an intimacy which, she thinks, breeds and festers in cities, especially among the wealthy classes.
Madras rolls away. It is already dark. Chingleput, Madurantakam. She feels the sea recede. It is hours before she must change trains for Kulithalai. The sound of Vairum’s voice returns to her on the rhythm of the train. “Go… Go… Go…”
One day, when Vairum was small, he came to her urgently, wanting to tell her a story Gayatri had told him, of Lord Ganesha and his brother Murughan. The young gods’ father, Shiva, had set up a competition, saying that the brother to most swiftly circle the entire world would inherit all its peoples and riches. Lean, noble Murughan leapt onto his peacock. It spread its wings with a shriek and sped off, to return in moments. Like that! Vairum said, and snapped his fingers.
When Murughan returned, Ganesha was still standing where his brother had left him. Murughan dismounted with a swagger and bowed to receive the winner’s garland from his father.
“Very good!” said Shiva as he stepped forward and placed the garland over Ganesha’s elephant head.
Vairum let his mouth fall open, dramatizing Murughan’s shock. Shiva explained, “While you sped through the heavens, your brother, not even summoning his mouse”-that’s Ganesha’s vehicle, explained Vairum, as Sivakami pretended not to know-“walked clockwise around his mother. ‘Mother is the entire world,’ he said, ‘I need go no farther.’ And he fell at her feet and received her blessing and stood back up just as you arrived.”
“I’m surprised fatso could move that fast,” Vairum improvised on Murughan’s behalf. But he accepted defeat and also fell at his mother’s feet, at which point Vairum had leapt at Sivakami, throwing his arms around her, burying his face in her stomach. She could feel the warmth of him, even now, her precious boy, his face making a veronica of her belly
Mother is the entire world. This is what we believe, she wants to shout out the window. He will hear her, back in his enchanted, sorrowful house, because this is the truth. Did she not raise him any better than this?
At Vellur, a young couple board. The floor between the benches has just been vacated. They spread their bedding. Sivakami cannot see them but can hear from their speech that they are Brahmins. The girl wakes with the first beams of light and smiles up at Sivakami.
“Where are you going, Granny?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.
“Kulithalai.” Sivakami is sitting by the window now, her feet tucked under her.
“Who is… is he your grandson?” she asks, pointing to a young man next to Sivakami, whose head, bobbing in sleep, Sivakami has been trying for some hours to avoid.
“No, I am travelling alone.”
The girl pauses, and Sivakami winces.
“You are so brave!” says the girl, her voice different now.
“One must be brave in this life,” Sivakami says, hoping for some distraction to end this. “When life gives no choice.”
“I am lucky,” comes the response, full of youth’s smugness. “Life has allowed me the choice of cowardice.”
No distraction has arrived, so Sivakami asks, “Children?”
“In about six months,” with a sign to ward off the evil eye.
“Very good.”
“This is my first time south. My husband has taken a job in Thiruchi. Water inspector. My mother is in Kanchipurum, and…”
They pull into a station platform with a roof and open sides. Sivakami has anxiously checked the name of every station they have pulled through in the night and now she sees the name she has been looking for: Kottai. Kottai! She is caught off guard. This is where she must change trains!
The young woman looks doubtful, but Sivakami hurries from the train along with a few rumpled families, squeezing past the rest of the passengers, still awakening, sitting up, scratching and yawning. She descends the rungs of the metal steps and hops onto the platform from the lowest, which is still high for her. She is some thirty paces from a pump and as she walks toward it she feels some cheer. It will be good to brush her teeth and wash her face. Soon, she will arrive home. She need only think of how to disguise her unescorted arrival. She is glad to have a mission to distract her from her terrible thoughts, her shame.
She takes out her neem stick and sets her bundle down. The water gushes out brightly and she moves the bundle out of its reach. She fills her brass jug and squats to scrub her face over the drain. She hears a voice calling “Granny, Granny!”-no doubt some young person meeting her grandmother after a long time, and she thinks of the grandchildren she might see soon. She wets her neem stick and puts it in her mouth as the train starts to pull away. She looks up at the train, then down. Where is her bundle?
The young woman who shared her carriage has come to the window and is waving and pointing, “Granny! Granny!” But then she is carried past into another void.
Did she see who took it?
Sivakami runs a little in each direction like a caricature of a woman in distress, then realizes she may as well finish cleaning her teeth, and stands chewing the stick like an imbecile. Her bundle is gone-her money, her ticket, her Kamba-Ramayanam. The only person left on the platform is a peon sleeping against the ticket booth at the far end. She savours the neem’s bitterness as she scrubs its frayed end over her teeth and tongue.
The platform sits on a plot of scrubby dirt and there are colonies of some kind in the near distance. This doesn’t look like a big station with frequent ongoing trains. She trudges toward the ticket booth, but it’s still closed and she doesn’t know what she would do if it were open. The dozing peon, in a rumpled uniform of khaki shorts and shirt with fewer buttons than advisable, rolls onto his back. From the west, a woman in a khaki sari arrives and starts sweeping the station-likely her husband died in service, and she was given his job because the railways take care of their own. Sivakami doesn’t try to talk to anyone. She tries to think.
Saradha lives here somewhere. Somewhere in Thiruchi, on a street by the name of Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter, in house number “ 6,” as she recalls. She probably lives closer to the main station than to this place called Kottai, which is not what she thought it was. So if Sivakami follows the train she just disembarked, she will eventually arrive. She hopes she encounters a Brahmin quarter somewhere before long. She is parched.
Sivakami walks to the end of the platform, climbs off it to reach the track, where she puts her right foot upon a tie, and then her left foot on the next one. That’s the first step.
Or was Vairum’s last word the first step? Or was the first step when she took Vairum back to Cholapatti to raise him on her own? Or was it Hanumarathnam’s, fleeing to read his fate’s fulfillment in the sky? Now she tries not to think.
The sun rises, hot and hard. She passes through the centre of a labourers’ encampment, the unwashed wives tying sun-bleached hair back with other strands of hair, leaning over the day’s fire, the day’s gruel. The children point at Sivakami and run toward her, bellies out. Their mothers approach, shyly and swiftly, until Sivakami is forced to stop because a cordon has formed around her.
“Amma, Amma, where are you going, Amma?”
“I’m going to find my granddaughter.”
How dare they speak to her?
“Amma, Amma, why hasn’t she come to fetch you, Amma?”
“She doesn’t know I’m here.”
Why are they not making way?
“Amma, Amma, please sit, Amma. Please sit.”
“Please, please let me go on.”
So many people she was never meant to meet.
“Amma, Amma, be careful, Amma.”
“I will. I will. Please, let me go on.”
They part to permit her egress, grinning at her distress, or so she feels.
God willing, her Cholapatti neighbours will never know she has gone through this. How many of their lives contain miseries hidden from her? She remembers wondering this when Rukmini, poor dear, and Gayatri were going through their troubles. But her compassion for them doesn’t reduce her own desire for privacy: we are ill equipped to bear even our own sadnesses, she knows, and many burdens are only made heavier by sharing.
She sees a big hill and wonders if it is Malaikottai, the Ganesha temple she has dreamed of visiting. Maybe Saradha will take her there. She wonders how far she is from Saradha’s house.
She squints against the rails’ glare, the sun a feverish palm on her crown. A burst of laughter causes her to turn her head. She almost missed it: a pilgrims’ pavilion, a stone gazebo, in a triangle formed by the rail line and two roads.
Sivakami approaches. She must get out of the sun for a moment. She would rather the place have been empty, but…
The bunch sitting on the cool stone rip into peals of merriment again and their babble, as Sivakami approaches, resolves into speech. She stops. They are Brahmins. They will wonder if she is known to them. She may be, by marriage or some other connection. They call out to her. “Mami, please, Mami, sit. But… are you alone?”
“Yes, yes, alone,” she says, wishing she had just gone on.
“Please, sit.” They rise to make room for her.
“Sit, sit,” she insists, now that they are all standing. “Sit, I say.”
She clears her throat and looks away. Her mind is working more quickly even than she can think. She has the first word, she should use it to her advantage. “Where have you all come from?”
“Namakkal, Mami. Do you know it?”
She grew up in its shadow.
“I went there once, as a small child, with my grandparents. I don’t remember it. Wonderful, is it?”
“Oh, yes, a very fine place. And you, Mami, where do you come from”
“Cuddalore.”
That just popped out.
“Oh, our niece married into Cuddalore.”
“Ah, so you have been there?” she asks, terrified they will make reference to some landmark or family she doesn’t know.
“No, not us. This is as far as we have ventured. We are making a pilgrim tour, going to Palani, Srirangam, all the important places.”
“Very good, very good.” Sivakami is so relieved that she can no longer listen.
“And you, Mami?” they ask, their curiosity bursting to the surface. “How do you come to be so far from home, and alone?”
“A… penance,” she responds. Penance? “For… the sake of my son… who was ill.”
“Oh, no, Mami.” They are all sympathy. Their curiosity, though, is unrelieved.
“Yes, yes. He is well now, recovering, in Cuddalore, with his wife and family.” Sivakami listens to the sound of her voice. Has she ever been lied to as easily as she is now lying? “I pledged a pilgrimage,” she continues slickly.
“But if he was sick, shouldn’t he do the pilgrimage?” One of the wives asks, unable to contain herself.
“I pledged, I pledged to do it. Alone. Myself, alone. Maybe he will also do it someday. He is a good and pious boy, very attached to me. He protested.”
Sivakami, relieved both of the heat and the pressure of possible acquaintanceship, speaks with increasing conviction.
“But I told him, God accepted a small price for your health, for a useless old widow to undertake a journey alone. He shouldn’t be so attached. I have no husband; my children are grown. I wish for God to take me. My work on this earth is over.”
It’s what old people say, but this is the first time she has said it, and now it occurs to her that she might mean it.
“Will you take some of our food, Mami?” asks another of the wives.
“No, no, please, thank you.” They understand, and don’t press.
“But… water?” asks the first man who spoke.
“Yes.” She holds out her jug and they pour water into it from one of their vessels.
“Where will you stay in Thiruchi?”
“With…” Oh, no, what if Saradha’s related to them? “My granddaughter.” She didn’t think quickly enough-she should have said a chattram. But they might be staying in a chattram and might have insisted on taking her.
“Her husband’s good name?” asks the first man again.
It’s easier to tell the truth now than lie. “Sivasamba lyer.”
“Ah.” No recognition.
“And your good names?” she asks politely.
“Ranganathan lyengar.”
Oh, they are lyengar-a different sub-caste from hers. She ceases listening again, relief pounding in her ears. No relation. She nods with real happiness as Ranganathan Iyengar introduces his brother, their wives, their children. They are slightly, almost imperceptibly, chillier toward her, which is as she prefers.
They have just finished their meal and lie down to rest through the heat of the day. Sivakami lies down too, but when the food in their bellies goes to their heads, she slips down off the cool platform back into the sun. She can’t risk their accompanying her, which they surely would do. She is sure to be caught in a lie if she is forced to talk any longer and would rather her face be burnt by the sun than by embarrassment. It’s terrible that she prefers her lies to the truth, but, she has learned, that’s what some lies are like.
Three furlongs down the tracks from where she left the cheery pilgrims, she finds a crumbling roadside shrine hung with crisply browned jasmine garlands. The god within is everyone’s favourite, chubby Ganesha. Sivakami smiles sadly at his friendly elephant face, grasps her left ear in her right hand and her right ear with the other and squats a few times, the traditional abasement for him. As she rises from her last squat, she falls forward onto her knees and grasps the shrine, sobbing.
Her tears turn instantly to dry pits in the dusty ground. She squints up at her old friend, and quietly shrieks, “Take me. Take me!”
The god responds good-humouredly, “I cannot take you. But I cannot stop you either. Come along if you want.”
“Take me, I say! Please, Lord.”
“Come, foolish lady,” he smiles, but not as though he has time to waste, “if you want to so badly.”
Sivakami circles the shrine thrice, in a temper. Has she not been a firm and doubtless devotee? Has she not lived by every prescription she knows?
The gods do love their jokes: human prayer is always earnest and divine replies so often ironic. Sivakami throws up her hands and returns to walking along the track, stepping from one tie to the next. She doesn’t look back nor about. She maintains a dim awareness of her feet, one in front of the other, in front of the other, on the wooden ties which fall one in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front-just like the train-in front of the other in front of the other… in fact there’s a train on the track. There’s a train on the track train on the track train on the track… She can’t see it yet, but the vibrations are growing. She hasn’t looked around in some time. Now she finds she is deep within a ditch, the track laid in a furrow with embankments on both sides taller than she is.
Here is her reward, the answer to her prayers. She need only accept.
The head of the train appears. Accept.
Its face nears. It screams and the noise hits her, a foretaste of steel. The rails sing all about her, showing her the way: this is how to die. This is how to die. This is how to die-
Sivakami flings herself against the steep embankment, reaching for a pole sticking out of it. Her body flat against the slope, she pulls herself up, toes pushing like a gecko’s into crumbling dust, fingers grasping, beyond the pole, for the thin grass and roots. Her hands have reached flat ground when suddenly her toes slide away on something slick: the railway is everyman’s toilet and Sivakami loses her toehold in some malnourished tot’s leavings even as, with a thud, the beast of her possible deliverance arrives to flatten the space she left behind, singing, Don’t you want to die? Don’t you want to die? Sivakami slides back down to meet her fate, flashing beneath her feet, but then she hits the pole. She wraps herself around it, clinging upside down like a baby monkey to its mother.
As the train passes, a thousand startled travellers crane out their windows to gawk back at the little Brahmin widow, her dust-stained sari blown from her stubbly head. Their bewilderment almost matches her own. She has always thought of her life as a series of submissions to God. What if she has been making her own decisions all along?
The train has passed. Elation and disappointment pound in her head like the waters of the ocean she never saw. She steps down to collect her brass jug from where it fell to one side of the track, then she climbs again, slowly, from the moat, by stepping on stones and wildflower patches. She has eluded death-why did she do that?
She collects her breath and, trembling, waits for the sound of waves to subside. It doesn’t. She is hearing water.
It’s her beloved and reviled Kaveri. She leaves the track and walks over a hillock toward the sound, passes through a parting in some brush, and there it is, familiar and unknowable as ever. She fills her brass jug, and rinses the film from her eyes, the dust from her skin, and the residue of recent adventures from the soles of her feet. Her exhilaration is ebbing. Did she defeat her god? Is she now truly alone?
Sivakami glances up from her thoughts to see one of her Cholapatti neighbours-Visalakshi, from three doors down-coming toward her, a friendly but puzzled expression on her face. Oh, she has been spotted, now everyone will know. What is Visalakshi doing here?
But it isn’t Visalakshi: it’s some other young woman with the same figure, same round cheeks and frizzy hair, stopping at a respectful distance to ask, “Mami is all right? Does she need some assistance?”
“No, no, child,” Sivakami replies, and then realizes she does in fact. “I am… I need to find, Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter.”
“Hmm.”
The young woman makes a great show of thinking. She calls her family over and they all think. Clearly none of them knows. Finally, the eldest man in the group speaks on their behalf.
“Well, you must go to Thiruchi proper. All right? Cross that bridge, then you will see it.”
Sivakami intended on going that way regardless, so she is spared the embarrassment of not taking their advice. She bids them a decorous farewell.
Rested and cooled, but still as deeply shaken by her failure as her success in not dying, she follows the little path back to the road and starts following it toward the next bridge. She recites Kamban’s Ramayana to herself-she knows it so well that she hardly needs the book, but it, too, had become a talisman-the only book she has ever read. Each verse falls from her lips like a curtain against the entry of thought.
As she reaches the end, she spots a Brahmin walking in the same direction. She hurries to overtake him and accosts him by asking, “To go to Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter?”
He turns: it’s the priest from the Vishnu temple at the end of the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter! A vicious gossip. She recalls his pious, lascivious voice, like a bletted papaya.
But no, it’s just some other paunchy, middle-aged Brahmin. He informs her officiously that Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter is close to Malai Kottai, and points, with confidence approaching boredom, back the way she has just come. He clearly assumes she is a cook or some equivalent. She must be quite black, she thinks, after all these hours in the sun. For her part, she suspects he has just performed a funeral on Saradha’s street, at extortionate prices.
He at least knows where she needs to go, however. She returns to the bridge and walks back.
Every hundred paces, it seems, she sees some familiar old acquaintance from Cholapatti. Is that babbling and limping old man not the same one Dharnakarna the witch cast her spell over three years ago? He is lewd and foul-mouthed and she has forbidden her granddaughters’ kids to get within twenty paces of him, but now he seems like a fixture of home and she wishes she had food to give him.
It’s not him. That hiccuping laugh that turns her head is not Gayatri’s. She asks directions again. She follows a bend in the road. That hoot and holler is not Raghavan’s. Raghavan, such a robust and cheerful boy. Just the occasional grey shadow in those golden eyes, only to be expected. She has stopped to seek him out in a cricket ground, though she knows by now that the sturdy boy running at her out of the dust is not him, and the lanky silhouette following is not Krishnan.
But then why are they embracing her?
It is they.
Sivakami doesn’t respond to their questions. Each boy takes one of her arms, and they walk across the field to the street. The sun is showing its colours in the west, but Sivakami can make out her eldest granddaughter’s compact shape, leaning on a front wall, chatting with her mother-in-law and a neighbour.
Saradha shrieks. “Amma! Amma! What are you doing? Where are you? What… what did you boys do?” She looks ready to hit them as they guide Sivakami inside.
“We found her,” Krishnan says defensively. “We were playing, Raghavan looked over, and she was standing by the edge of the field.”
“What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!” Saradha is in a panic. “Amma, say something, Amma, why don’t you say anything? Raghavan, go get water for Amma.”
Saradha’s in-laws graciously retire to other parts of the house. Her husband is still at work. Sivakami opens her mouth. She holds it open a second, then shuts it again. Saradha pours water into Sivakami’s jug, and Sivakami moistens her mouth and throat, and after some moments, asks, “Where is the washroom? I have not had my bath today.”
“Sit for some more time, Amma.” But Sivakami asks again for the bathroom. As she locks the door, Saradha asks, “Amma, when did you last eat?”
“Yesterday,” she says into the dank and welcome solitude-out of the world’s eye at last. “Don’t worry, child. Let me have my bath and then I will make my rice.”
“Yes, Amma. I will… I will prepare vegetables for you to cook.”
“Good girl.”
Saradha’s sons, Raghavan and Krishnan’s coevals, had been out playing cricket with their uncles but not recognized their great-grandmother so readily. They followed them home, quiet and incurious, though it is obvious that something bad has happened. Raghavan and Krishnan also ask no questions but show concern. When Radhai returns from visiting at a friend’s house, she is panicked, but her elder sister silences her with a finger.
When Sivakami is nearly finished eating, Saradha finally makes her first sally.
“Amma, when is Vani Mami expecting?” Sivakami doesn’t answer. Saradha tries one more remark. “She must be very big.”
“She is no bigger than she was a year ago at this time,” Sivakami informs her.
“Ah.” Saradha bites her lip.
Her kitchen is orderly to the point of excess, Sivakami has noted, with approval and without surprise. Each time she used a spice, Saradha, hovering, returned it to exactly the spot from which it came.
“Amma, why on earth did you leave Madras, Amma?” she asks.
“Because my son told me to go,” Sivakami explains evenly.
“He thought you shouldn’t be waiting around any more.” Saradha nervously adjusts her sari.
Once more, Sivakami doesn’t feel like replying.
“He didn’t send a servant with you?” Saradha whispers sympathetically.
There is a long pause in their conversation.
“But you should have informed us that you were coming!” Saradha throws up her hands and rolls her eyes, as if Sivakami were just too spontaneous.
“I intended to go straight through to Cholapatti without troubling anyone else.” Sivakami finishes her meal. Dribbling water around the spot where her banana leaf lay, so as to ensure no one will step on the polluted spot before she can wipe it, she folds the leaf away from her and carries it back into the courtyard to wash her hands.
“Why did you get down in Thiruchi then instead of going on to Cholapatti?”
“I don’t know what happened. I got confused. And my bundle disappeared, someone took my ticket and money while I was washing my face.”
“Oh, no, Amma.” Saradha lifts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no.”
Sivakami waits for Saradha to stop wailing. She would feel worse if the girl didn’t react like this, but it’s not making her feel much better.
Saradha finally dries her tears and asks, “How did you find your way?”
“How does it matter? I found my way. How is your husband?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“How are your in-laws?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Good.”
“Come,” Saradha says, after a pause, standing with the busy air of the excellent housewife. “Lie down now.”
“Yes.”
Saradha unfurls a straw mat for Sivakami in a corner of the hall as the in-laws return and exchange niceties from a distance.
From the floor, Sivakami tells Saradha, “I want to go to Malai Kottai tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow morning, before I get on the train for Cholapatti. I want to go to the top of Malai Kottai.”
“Aren’t you terribly exhausted, Amma? You must stay longer.”
“No. I want to look on that god’s face in the morning.”
“All right, Amma,” she capitulates, sounding concerned. “Sleep now.”
But Sivakami is already asleep.
At dawn the next morning, Sivakami and Saradha go by cycle rickshaw to the foot of the hill temple. Sivakami wanted to walk but finally capitulates only because Saradha said she herself couldn’t walk three miles to the temple and then climb it. In the rickshaw, Saradha asks if they are retracing the route she took. Sivakami thinks they must be but it looks even less familiar now than it did then, when she thought she knew everyone she passed. Now, with Saradha at her side, she can see the streets’ real strangeness. She might have wondered how she made her way, but it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t. That was the least of her concerns. What will happen when next she sees Vairum? What does he think happened to her after she left-and how can such a son live with himself?
They dismount from the rickshaw at the entrance to a thickly crowded corridor into the temple’s first vestibule, and walk along a cordon of small shops into the oil-lamp-lit, stone-floored room. Voices rebound with the sound of coconuts shattering, thrown hard in a trough, as offerings or thanks, while devotees mill in circles around a wide tree growing out of the floor and into the ceiling. The smells of burning camphor and incense press hard against the smells of sweat, soap and hair oil.
Sivakami bustles straight to the stairs that ascend through the mountain’s centre to its summit, and begins to climb rapidly, one hand on the rough wall to steady her, only one impatient glance back to check that Saradha is following.
Their legs grow painful, then heavy, then numb. Saradha struggles to keep pace. A bat dips into the stairwell from a high cavern in the walls. Sivakami listens to the rhythm of her steps against the stone, the brushing of her hand on the wall, her heart pumping, her breath rasping. She hears it all as though she were a bat, both within herself and high above, both inside the mountain and climbing it. They pass by chambers and niches for worship and rest. She doesn’t stop, not once.
When they come out into the light, they are beside a small cave, with a smooth, level floor, a pillar-framed entrance and walls carved with row upon row of writing. Finally, Sivakami pauses and thinks, as she is meant to here, of kings. Chola kings-did they build this? To guard the city against the marauding Pandians from the south? Was it earlier? The Pallavas? The walls might tell her, but the Tamil is archaic, and though she stands mouthing the syllables, they don’t assemble into meaning.
Still, she moves her eyes along each and every line of the inscription, an exercise not unlike her incessant reading of the Kamba-Ramayanam. She looks at that book because she thinks it important that Brahmins not forget how to read, and for that reason, now, she reads the inscription without understanding any of it and then begins again to climb. She calls out to Saradha, who is leaning against an opposite wall, her eyes still closed but her chest no longer heaving. After one more long flight of stairs, they emerge from the mountain onto smooth, bald rock. Sivakami walks to the edge of the small plateau and beholds the city with the Kaveri River, its reason for being, streaking unconcernedly down its centre.
She sees people below. It is too far down to make out any individual, besides which her eyesight is not what it once was. But Sivakami imagines she sees the kings and armies of olden times, the Pallavas, Pandians, Cholas, Nayaks, battling to gain territory, struggling to keep it. She sees Kannagi and Kovalan, of the Tale of an Anklet, passing through the city on their great and terrible journey south to find their fate in the kingdom of a careless monarch. She sees pilgrims, she sees merchants. Seafaring Chinese and African traders; Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, laughing with them. And, arriving from the northeast, she sees herself, small and determined, fighting confusion, indignity and peril, and finding her way, in an unrecorded triumph.
Saradha is sitting beside her, now, enjoying the view. Sivakami thumps her encouragingly on the back and Saradha gives her a watery smile. There is yet one more flight of stairs-to the belvedere.
Saradha has always liked this temple. She always brings visitors and enjoys with them a leisurely ascent, with many stops for exploring the cavernous temple chambers hollowed from the mountain’s centre, savouring a strong flavour of self-righteousness on completing the difficult climb and a pleasing glow of fatigue in the thighs. This insane dash has deprived her of all the en route pleasure, and now the tearing sensation in her lungs and the weakness in her legs are preventing her even from enjoying her spiritual point-scoring. Worse, Sivakami exhibits no consciousness of all this, no sense of how it all should be done. She is not even mouthing about how healthy the climb is, how holistic Hindu worship, how superior every Brahmin devotional act.
Rather, Sivakami is bounding, without a word, for the final staircase to the tiny Ganesha shrine at the top. It is enclosed in a cupola with open frames on all sides. Saradha lets her go.
Sivakami joins the other pilgrims circling the god, one of the primary modes of worship. In the course of her first circumnavigation, though, her courage deserts her. Sadly, she confronts Ganesha.
“Are you still there?” she asks, quaking.
“I am.”
“But I didn’t come.” She looks down, her lip trembling. “I didn’t take the chance when the train… I must have been frightened.”
“Mortals refuse most divine offers.” He sounds sad. And amused. “You’ve done nothing new. It reflects well on you that you were tempted. But so few of you accept our gifts, even ones you have prayed for.”
Ganesha is the god of new beginnings, and she missed her chance to end this life and begin another one, fresh. What other divine offers has she denied?
But now Saradha has reached her, and together they make several more turns around the idol. Sivakami thinks Saradha is acting a bit strange, looking at her nervously. She can understand that her dash and insistence might have been alarming. Saradha has had a shock-seeing her grandmother appear, walking on the street with nothing but a brass jug, as if she were some itinerant person-a siddha, for instance-and not the respectable grandmother she has always known.
Sivakami tries to speak reassuringly, says how glad she is to have visited the shrine, and how invigorating the climb was, and asking which way is Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter and can they see it from up here? They make their way slowly down again, stopping to see whatever Sivakami senses Saradha wants to show her.
She gives in and stays two days in Thiruchi; then it’s Saturday and a half-day at school. That evening, Krishnan escorts her to Cholapatti. Muchami fetches a locksmith to open the padlock, and Sivakami, at last, is home.