JANAKI UNFOLDS THE NEWSPAPER and comes face to face with a face she last saw in front of the Madurai chattram, seven years earlier, before the palanquin curtains fell and ended the scene.
She feels the need to smooth her kitchen-puffed hair and re-pleat her sari pallu, which is crumpled and tucked like a crying infant over her shoulder and into her waist. She feels as skinny and provincial as she did as a child, when Bharati used to look past her much as she is now looking past Janaki from Janaki’s lap.
The photo accompanies an article, and half of the page opposite is taken up with a movie advertisement. It has a border composed of a drawing of Bharati in a three-quarter view expressing pleasure and dismay as though in response to a declaration of illicit love, blending into the valiant leading man, and then into the conniving, mustachioed villain. These images twist like a vine from a tableau along the bottom: Bharati, flowing hair escaping her widow’s whites as she wrenches her wrist from one of the men.
The article in Dinamani is a packet of the standard glowing rot: “Miss Bharati, the product of a modest, middle-class home in Kulithalai, always had a great love of music and was encouraged by her mother and father to pursue it seriously. Of course, her parents expected her to perform at home only, but Miss Bharati has taken a vow to marry her art only. She has been most inspired by the example of Sri Rukmini Devi, alias Mrs. Arundale, whose thrilling debut onto the Madras stage helped Miss Bharati to convince her doting parents that the Indian classical arts can and must be practised by respectable girls. ‘It is a necessary step in the building of an independent, modern nation,’ said Miss Bharati, an ardent nationalist, who is twenty years complete.” Janaki wonders if the paper colluded or was duped into knocking eight years off Bharati’s age.
She folds the paper and lies back on the low, narrow cot she has had built for the women’s room. She has done the kolam, bathed, dressed and fed her children, sent Thangajothi off to school, consulted with the kitchen staff and overseen the start of the day’s preparations. The servants should be leaving any minute with her twin sons, taking them back to their village just as she went back to Muchami’s. This gives her a precious half-hour to look through the newspaper before taking a bath, doing her puja and giving the Sanskrit tutorial at the paadasaalai. She’s excited these days because there is one new pupil who is quite talented. His gifts took her by surprise because his skin is so dark: she didn’t think he looked so bright when he arrived. Now, she finds herself planning special challenges for him, just as young Kesavan did for her and Bharati.
Her sons, Sundar and Amarnath, active two-year-olds, gallop in, damp and toasty from playing in the garden. Every day, they come in at this time and act as though it were a delightful surprise to find her, nearly prone, vulnerable to their attack. Today, they cheer: “Hip hip hooray!” She wonders if they learned the English syllables from their cousin Shyama, a bright boy bound for a bad end. Hers are good boys, she can tell already, and they will remain so if she can keep them from bad influences: Amarnath, a reflective boy who she hopes will outgrow his propensity to cry easily, and Sundar, a resilient bouncy sort who will certainly try his teachers and be beaten but never broken. They are inseparable, which as far as she is concerned is only good.
They throw themselves on her, Sundar with a roar, Amarnath with a squeak, and she submits, pressing their heads to her to quiet them, because grandchildren are not among Senior Mami’s interests. Thankfully, she hears the servants call that the prams are ready to go. She kisses the boys and pulls from under the cot a box of wooden blocks they can take with them. The blocks are painted with English letters; Baskaran bought them in Madurai last year.
She returns to wondering how long it will be before Clouds in the Eyes, Bharati’s debut vehicle, comes through Pandiyoor with one of the touring talkies.
Janaki used to say she had never been to the cinema; now she says she has not been yet. She waited until the most conservative families on the Brahmin quarter started permitting their children before she would consider it for hers, though she still has not gone, nor has Thangajothi. Movie-going doesn’t cause the gossip it might have once, but it’s one of Janaki’s points of pride to do everything possible to uphold conservative values in their household.
Folding the newspaper with a noisy yawn, she curls onto her side for a catnap. Clouds in the Eyes, she decides, will be her debut experience, too.
At half past three, Thangajothi arrives home from school, cranky because she is ravenous, and unwilling, as always, to eat. She’s a bright girl, but complicated. With her is her cousin, Shyama, who is singing.
“Caw! Caw! Caw!” he bellows, the refrain of one of the season’s most popular songs.
Sundar leaps and hinges himself to Shyama’s side, Amarnath falls in behind. They’ve already joined in the chorus, a terrible, joyful caw-caw-phony. Janaki ignores them in the way of young mothers, wearing her authority with little grace. She fetches balls of thaingai maavu and instructs them to break bananas off the stalk in the pantry, pulls Thangajothi onto her lap and force-feeds her while Shyama entertains them.
He went to the touring talkies last night with his elder brothers, neither of whom made it to college, but who make it to the movies several times a month. Shyama is the youngest child of one of Baskaran’s sisters. She married into Tamapakkam, Pandiyoor’s other half, across the Vaigai. The groom turned out to be a Communist, which unfortunately resulted in an aversion to work, a love of sloganeering, and a pressing desire to give away his inheritance the moment it dropped into his hands. As a result, he has a lifetime honorary membership in the Communist Party and several unions for trades he has never practised while his family lives on what Baskaran can eke out for his sister by investing the dowry her husband naturally refused. She had capitulated to her husband in naming their first three children-Stalin and Lenin, and a daughter, Russia -but insisted the last have the name of her favourite composer, Shyama Sastri.
Shyama spends more waking time in Janaki’s house than in his own, because the food and the audiences are so much better. As he snacks, he renders for them, line by line, note by scene, the film he saw last night, one of the year’s causes célèbres. It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister’s wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn’t know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her.
Shyama acts out all the scenes with verve and conviction but reserves a special energy for the songs, whose lyrics are full of attempts at political subversion. One, a siddha song, goes, “If a rich man tells a lie, it will be taken as a truth… Money makes leaders of fools… Even when crying over a dead body, watch your pockets!” The song Shyama had been singing when he entered the house asks why all men cannot simply share with their brethren, the way crows do.
“Caw! Caw! Caw! Beggars fight for food in the trash, while the mighty fight for money! Crows always call one another to share food, but people, never… Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“But children, look.” Janaki sees an opening. “Crows call other crows to eat. They’re not calling sparrows and ducks and monkeys. We all look after our own families, our own community,” Janaki points out, confident in her logic. “You see? Brahmins look after Brahmins, non-Brahmins after their own sort.”
“Communists are different,” Shyama retorts.
“Don’t talk back,” returns Janaki. A pause follows. “Drink your milk.”
Shyama, unoffended, continues the story. The political content of the film becomes increasingly pointed, including specific references to up-and-coming champions of the DMK, newest party in Tamil nationalism, though it is lost on him.
In the film’s culminating scene, the brother gulls a corrupt Brahmin priest, castigating him in the voice of the goddess Parasakthi. When the hero reveals himself, it is to make a speech in classical Tamil, a language practically foreign to those in the land of its origins. The DMK is revitalizing it, making a gift to the masses of their own tongue.
The film is so popular that most audience members can now recite this curlicued speech, and the syllables thrum from them in the tents of the touring talkies, as they do from Shyama now. Janaki is just about to stop him-the children, who can’t understand, are restless, while she can’t bear any more polemic-when Baskaran comes in holding a letter and looking grave. He holds up a finger and Shyama stops speaking.
“Janaki.” He beckons her to come close and she disentangles herself from her daughter and rises. “We need to go to Madras. Your sister Sita is travelling there for surgery. It!’s”-he clears his throat-“cancer. I’m sorry. She will stay with your uncle Vairum and need help with the children, though of course we would want to go anyway, at least for a few days.”
They decide that they can go to Madras for ten days, so Thangajothi doesn’t miss more than a week at school. The girl is a top performer and Janaki is keenly interested in making sure she maintains her grades. She and Baskaran have not discussed it with anyone else, but Janaki wants to break with tradition in one critical way, and Baskaran supports her: their bright girl will go to college.
Janaki recalls having thought she noticed a black patch on Sita’s tongue last summer, but, with advancing age, patches and discolorations are not unusual. But it was, it turns out, malignant. Sita had gone to Madras for a biopsy some six months earlier, but treatments had failed to halt the spread of the cancer and now her tongue must be cut out in hopes of saving her.
Kamalam arrives in Madras a few days before Sita’s surgery; Janaki arrives the day of the procedure. Kamalam minds Sita’s elder children, girls of twelve and four, and seven-year-old twin boys, along with her own child and stepchildren, while Vani tends Sita’s babies, twin boys as well. When Janaki comes, she offers to help, over the clamouring jealousy of her own twins, with Sita’s babies, but Vani refuses. Janaki and Kamalam look at each other, remembering the Adyar Beach scene they witnessed on their first visit to Madras, all those years ago, and hope that Vani will be able to give the babies up when Sita recovers.
They also wonder whether Sivakami has been told. They’re almost certain Vairum would not have told her. As far as they know, he has not spoken a word to her since he sent her away. All of Thangam’s children have chosen to remain on good terms with him, and he has done nothing to discourage this but has made it clear he wants to hear nothing of his mother. Any time she is mentioned in his presence, he spits some disparaging remark, which wounds them so that they have all learned to avoid saying anything about their grandmother around him.
Janaki must return home but makes Kamalam promise that she will ask Sita, once she is stronger, whether Sivakami knows of the illness.
Janaki had framed that article about Bharati in creases, torn it out and stored it between the pages of a book of embroidery patterns, Stitches and Pictures, that Baskaran had given her in the early days of their marriage. She reread it several times in the weeks that followed.
Now, Clouds in the Eyes is coming to Pandiyoor. In contrast to Parasakthi, it has not been much of a hit and may be here only a few days. Janaki must act. She asks Baskaran to make arrangements for the next day.
Their bullock cart and driver are sent around to collect Shyama, his brothers and Baskaran’s nephews and nieces. Amarnath and Sundar are installed at a neighbour’s house and the paadasaalai cook will feed Baskaran’s parents. They set off for a tent in a field. The driver is a great film aficionado, and already unfortunately politicized-he has seen Parasakthi seven or eight times, Baskaran’s family servant Gopalan has reported, and Baskaran is considering sacking him before something happens. Tonight, though, he will enjoy some harmless entertainment.
As they walk down the centre aisle, people on both sides rise, a caterpillar undulation, men shucking shoes and lowering the flaps of their tucked-up dhotis, the few women hiding behind men and uncreasing a bit of sari to cover their shoulders. Baskaran puts his palms together, bowing to the sides, waving his hand in gentle slashes to tell the people to sit. The family has seats in the chair class, behind the benches and those who would be seated on the ground were they not now standing. Even in the costliest class, a number of people stand, shuffle and consolidate to ensure the Brahmins are seated together.
The movie is unmemorable yet will earn an entry in chronologies of significant works, owing to Bharati’s presence alone. She plays the role of an upper-class girl, kidnapped and forced into servitude by a villainous landowner angered at not having her hand for his son. The hero is her sweetheart, who mourns her disappearance with her parents in their home village. He imagines that she escapes her abductors but becomes lost in a forest. In his vision, she wanders, singing to keep up her spirits, melancholy at her plight but full of faith that God will save her. In a glade, she encounters a harp. As clouds part to light her, she leans her fair cheek against the curve of burnished wood and strokes out rounds of a tune Western audiences would have recognized as “Greensleeves.” The lover, wending his own melancholy way in search of a medicinal herb his aged parents asked for, hears her song and follows the notes to find her, the song from his lips joining hers while he is still out of sight. Her voice catches when she hears him, but when she pauses her song and darts futile glances into the woods from her large, kohl-rimmed eyes, his song stops. She trills a signal phrase that he answers; she sings a line or two that he echoes; the rest is easily imagined. The tented audience erupts.
Janaki went rigid with Bharati’s first scene and has stayed in a state of high nervousness throughout the film. She has never seen a film before, and this experience is sufficiently incomprehensible, but seeing Bharati makes her wish she had some privacy in which to sort out the muddle of her feelings.
Baskaran nudges his wife. “You know what? She looks like you,” he says and winks.
Janaki surges with rage against her old friend. It serves Bharati right, this destiny of performing in front of people one can’t even see. Cine-acting may as well be what Bharati was raised to do, though neither she nor her mother could have foreseen it. Bharati surely holds herself well apart from the descendants of obsolete theatre families who also drifted into this variant on their hereditary profession. They have all been cast out together by modernity, she thinks with vicious satisfaction.
Worse, Baskaran is right, though the resemblance, as far as Janaki can tell, is only in their features. She had never dared try to emulate Bharati’s gestures, such as the way she moves her eyebrows ironically and hands sincerely, making the viewer feel she is being falsely modest. After seeing how Bharati hunches protectively over the bowl of the veena as though it is a cradle, however, Janaki wants to try it, though she knows she would never do so with anyone else watching. She wonders if an opportunity will arise to tell Baskaran about her connection to Bharati and, if so, whether she’ll take it. But when they get home, they talk of other, more urgent, matters: Dhoraisamy’s health, which is, perhaps, failing, and the problem of a squatter on one of their plots of land.
The big news of this week, though, is that the creators of Parasakthi-who are touring the eastern part of this region still known as Madras to present to their fans, live and in person, the beloved speeches and songs from the movie-will arrive in Pandiyoor in a few days’ time.
A dais is erected in the largest town square and decorated in ribbon-works with the DMK logo-a stylized rising sun-winking from the centre of every pouf. That day, the town is overrun; the square overflows. Every cinema-goer within seventy miles of Pandiyoor has come for the show, except most Brahmins, who stay home.
From the women’s room, Janaki and Thangajothi make out the faint boom and echo of miked and undiluted Tamil together with the growing echo and boom of the audience, which spreads along the streets radiating south, east and west from the square so the gathering takes the form of an immense, palpitating DMK logo.
Thangajothi sits on the floor, playing at sorting her collections: tamarind seeds, cowries, pebbles, beads. Her lips move in exact accord with the speeches from the squares. With the first song, her brothers burst through the doorway, fists and hips punching in time, “Caw! Caw! Caw!” and scattering her precious objets. She screams and Janaki suggests they all move out into the main hall and try to disturb Senior Mami a bit less.
The doors to the anteroom and veranda are open, and Baskaran sits outside with his father. He had insisted, like all the Brahmin-quarter parents, that the children stay home from school today. Despite this, the quarter is unusually quiet, and seems even more so than it is in contrast with the noise at the square. Two rays of the rally stretch past the northern entrance of Single Street.
The applause and cheering has built for nearly three hours when it hits a sustained note, the sound of an effort to prevent something from ending. The celebrities must now be descending the dais, bodyguards sheltering them from their admirers. The stars make jocund attempts to sabotage the cordon, reaching across it to tap hands and clasp fingers. The bodyguards push puny, persistent peasants to the sides, creating a corridor for the stars, and then another for the cars, which begin slowly to pull away. The crowd is thousands deep-over half those present dance an escort for their departing heroes, and then depart after them, elated; others sit or walk away; yet another faction of some hundreds, farthest from the cars and closest to the Brahmin quarter, take their feelings to the streets.
Seeing the crowd approach, the Brahmin quarter rises from its verandas, goes inside its houses, closes its doors. Janaki glimpses the distorted faces of the impassioned oppressed, trying to renounce God and caste for a better life, as Baskaran ushers his father into the vestibule and slides the great upper and lower bolts into place. “Janaki, make sure the back gate and the back doors are all locked.”
Janaki hurries to follow his instructions and finds Gopalan already carrying them out, while Baskaran enters his father’s and mother’s redoubts to close and bolt the shutters inside the barred windows, and then does the same for all the high windows facing Single Street. Janaki finishes by shunting into place the upper and side bolts for the garden doors, where little Thangajothi is sliding their lower bolts down into the floor.
“I want you all to stay together down here, is that understood?” Baskaran looks at each of their faces in turn. “I am going up onto the roof to keep track of matters.”
“No, pa, please,” blurts Janaki.
“It’s all right.” He pats her hand and mounts the stairs. “They won’t even be able to see me, much less reach me, but I want to watch what they’re up to.”
When Baskaran looks down from the edge of the roof, the horde has rounded from Single Street on to Double Street, filling the empty road as they pour toward the Krishna temple. Three or four other men are on their roofs and they acknowledge one another without sign or sound, lords now serving as their own sentinels. Some in the massing throng carry flags or pennants; three badmashes hold aloft a giant portrait of Ganesha, wearing an insult, a garland of sandals, and some others, when they reach the temple, pelt it with their shoes. Baskaran thinks it is this that causes one Brahmin man at the end of the quarter to point, then make gestures as though signalling someone to go. Another joins him. Baskaran shares their outrage at the insults, but thinks, Surely they can’t believe these deranged and unthinking semi-citizens will pay attention? But now one of his neighbours is shouting west, and the others on their roofs are turning, and their message, relayed without distortion, reaches Baskaran.
“It’s Shyama. He’s in the crowd. Below.”
Baskaran is at his stairs and dashing down even before he comprehends what has happened.
Shyama is a hard child to pen. He had arrived at the Krishna temple from the side near the river in time to meet and be engulfed by the swarm. A young man with a bright face had mounted the temple platform and begun declaiming the atheistic speech. The crowd recited along, as did Shyama, bringing to bear all his own powers of oratory. The men around him smiled down at him, so young, so cute, so full of conviction. Then one of them noticed his holy thread and signalled to his mates by running the point of his finger and thumb from shoulder to hip and back-Brahmin-a gesture that stilled a small ring of men around him.
Shyama stops singing when a shoe hits him on the forehead. He looks around and finds he is surrounded by a half-dozen leering, jeering men, calling him names whose literal meaning he doesn’t understand. The men lift their dhotis in thrusting gestures of insult, for forty or fifty seconds, a long time for a child, before their fellows set upon them and slap them resoundingly. Shyama is picked up, patted and placed on the shoulders of a man who either finds it amusing to have a Brahmin mascot for this exercise or thinks this the safest place to put the child for the moment.
Raised above the crowd, Shyama is spotted by the last man on Double Street, but, absorbed again in the action of the rally, he doesn’t see the man shout and wave to him, then start to run.
When Gopalan sees his young master run shouting from the stairwell, he slips out the back, telling the cook he is summoning the police, who are circling but not interfering with the demonstration. At the front, Janaki bolts the door behind her husband as he has told her to, and presses her ear against it, sobbing silently so she can open it the instant he returns. Baskaran’s father opens his window a crack and sees his son set upon with blows and kicks on his own doorstep, as have been his two equally reckless neighbours along the road.
Two police constables fight their way through the crowd with billy sticks now. With Gopalan’s help, they carry Baskaran inside, his nose broken, scalp cut, blood crimsoning his kurta. Five minutes later, Gopalan bangs on the door again, this time with an unhurt Shyama in his arms.
Janaki spends a week nursing her husband back to relative health. Fortunately, most of his wounds are superficial. The first time she sees Shyama, she castigates him.
“Can you see now, what kind of sentiments those are? All men are equal! Bah! Why would they hurt someone, then, who never harmed them?”
Shyama doesn’t respond, except to stop coming to their house after school.
Baskaran, once he recovers, speaks to his nephew and persuades him to return, though Janaki cannot help but have another talk with him, in a gentler but still firm tone, and with Thangajothi as well, who she feels is at an impressionable age.
“My own uncle, he is very progressive in his politics. And you know what? He doesn’t even speak to his own mother. Can you imagine?”
She hadn’t wanted to use Vairum as an example, but feels it is urgent to alarm Shyama.
“We must look after one another, care for our own. Like crows, yes. Otherwise, we will no longer know ourselves.”
She has no idea, from Shyama’s expression, what he has taken from her speech, but she can see that her daughter is listening.
Two MORE LETTERS COME FROM MADRAS and this time Janaki is the one to receive them. The first, from Saradha, says that Sita has said, in notes on a slate, that she doesn’t imagine their grandmother knows anything of her illness. She herself did not tell Amma, but wanted to wait until she recovered to go and tell her in person and seek her blessing. The sisters feel they must permit her this, but the next letter, which arrives two months later, from Kamalam, says that Sita will not recover. Evidently, the cancer has spread: Sita is now dying.
Gathered in Madras, the siblings confer.
“I told Amma I was coming here on business,” Laddu confesses, “like I did last time. How can I tell her? She will want to come, and you know Vairum Mama doesn’t want that. It would be a debacle.”
Raghavan alone among them is in favour of bringing Sivakami to Madras. “Think: it could make them reconcile, when Vairum Mama sees her. Some good could come of this.”
His reasoning is not without validity, though all of the others are deeply skeptical. If Vairum felt pity for his mother, wouldn’t he have brought her there himself?
It is Krishnan who suggests, “Why don’t we ask Sitakka what she wants? ”
Sita is now lucid only for brief periods, when the morphine wears off or when it is first taking hold. Just after she receives a dose, but before she drifts off, they put the question to her. She takes up a piece of chalk and scratches dim letters on a slate: “No. It would hurt her too…”
Three days later, she dies. Among her effects, they find a sealed letter to Sivakami, and one to her brothers and sisters, whose contents are roughly the same. When the funeral is concluded, the granddaughters all go with Laddu to Cholapatti, to deliver the first to their grandmother.
Sivakami is instantly alarmed on seeing them. Saradha asks her to sit, and when she has, Laddu gives her the letter.
Dear Amma…
Sivakami starts to cry, in fear, it seems. Five months have passed since she last saw her grandchildren, all together for the holidays. She puts the letter down, dries her eyes and her palms on her sari and picks it up again.
You used to tell me I had a malignant tongue, and that it would be my ruin. Tell, God is finally punishing me: I won’t see my children grow up. I didn’t know my sins were so great, but what do we know? My illness has taught me how small and insignificant I really am.
I don’t have much longer now, I can feel that. My sisters will tell you details if you want them: I had cancer of the tongue, but even after the doctors removed my tongue, the cancer was not gone.
The one blessing that I have received is that, just as you and Vairum Mama cared for us when we were growing up, he and Vani Mami will raise my sons. They have wanted and deserved children for so long. It is some consolation to me that my sons will have a mother. My husband and I have given them leave to adopt.
Please don’t blame my brothers and sisters for not having brought you to Madras to see me. It is better you remember me as I was.
Your ever-loving granddaughter,
Sita
Sivakami shudders. She considers chastising her grandchildren but feels a cool cloud of reason settling over her: Sita evidently told them not to bring her, and why? She didn’t want to jeopardize the adoption by going against Vairum’s wishes. Sivakami doesn’t think it would have, but now Sita is gone, and Vairum is a father.
She realizes she has been silent a long time and looks at Saradha, Kamalam, Radhai and Janaki, who are holding hands and weeping. Their sorrow must be combined with guilt, for shocking their grandmother, especially after the fact, for not having liked Sita more, perhaps even for questioning Sita’s motives in the adoption: her sons, born to a lower-middle-class household, will be raised in riches. Their house may not have sons for seven generations, Sivakami thinks ruefully, but who knows whether those old rules even hold sway any more.
She goes to take the ritual bath that must follow immediately on news of a relative’s death. She is feeling, also with guilt, another emotion she can’t stop. A son of her son, a son of her son. As if borne on a train, a rush of images fill her mind’s eye: Vairum with two children, coming to show them to her, his snapping black-diamond eyes softened by affection, delight, pride, all the emotions denied to him all these years. Now that her wishes for him have all come true, he will bring the boys and they will all be hers again, the house lit with their laughter.
Some weeks later, Janaki’s daughter Thangajothi, is coming home from school, her cousin Shyama absorbed in a book beside her. Their bullock cart passes a row of huts they pass every day and a woman emerges to scrape a pile of rice out of a pot into the shallow roadside ditch. As the children’s bullock cart continues up the road, Thangajothi sees a crow circle and land, find the rice and start to eat.
He eats alone for a full five minutes before he calls his fellows. “Caw! Caw! Caw!”