SIVAKAMI CLUTCHES A Letter-holds it out from her bosom to read it again, a terse four or five lines, and then again brings it close: Vairum is bringing his sons.
His letter says he will come during the school holidays and stay a week. She will see her grandsons, not as she first met them, at their birth, when they were Sita’s children, but now as sons of her son, sons of her son… the little boys will play with the crowd of Thangam’s grandchildren, and all will be as she imagined, as it was meant to be. All she had to do was endure.
She is not exactly sure why, but she doesn’t tell Muchami about the letter for several days. Eventually, though, she must, because he needs to get the upstairs room ready to accommodate them. Her great-grandchildren play in that room but no one has slept there in years, and she’s not sure what state it’s in. Her granddaughters and their children sleep either in the main hall or on the roof; the second-storey room is hot, and since none of the husbands stay in the house, there has been no need for private quarters.
After she has gone over the details of routine summer preparation with him, she clears her throat. “There is something else, Muchami.”
“Oh?”
He looks polite and weary. They are both getting old. Since Mari died last year, he has had fewer reasons to make the trek back to his own home at night, and often just sleeps in Sivakami’s courtyard to avoid it. He spends most days there, too, in semi-retirement: Vairum has a full-time agricultural overseer for the lands, and the brightest of Muchami’s nephews now does all his heavy work.
“Yes. Vairum. He is coming with Vani, and bringing the children.” She beams; she can’t help it.
His reaction is as disappointing as she knew it would be: this is why she waited to tell him.
He nods. “Ah. So-I’ll ready the upstairs room.”
“Yes,” she says, and he goes.
She knows what he thinks of Vairum’s behaviour: that his grudges have gone past the point of reason, that his priorities are wrong. This letter is proof of Vairum’s basic good nature, she thinks, but how could she expect Muchami to see that? She doesn’t need to prove it. Let him see, when Vairum comes.
Muchami cleans cobwebs and dust from the upstairs room. Presumably, the little boys, after the first day or two, will sleep below, in the hall, or above, on the roof, with their cousins. He’ll have to check whether they have enough bedding for everyone. Janaki, Saradha and Kamalam usually bring their own. He’ll dispatch a letter this afternoon to make sure they do. They probably won’t leave their homes for a couple of days yet.
He squats, his head in his hand. Why can’t he believe, as Sivakami obviously does, that Vairum has had a change of heart?
In the two years when Mari was taking her treatments, he had had the chance to observe Vairum more closely than he has in the years since, but he has seen nothing to make him believe Vairum has changed his thinking. He came to Cholapatti as recently as a couple of months ago, and was as cold to Sivakami as ever. In all these years, Muchami has never told her more than he felt she needed to know, and he never talks to her of her son: not of the things Vairum says, against caste, against her; not of his own unspoken responses. Muchami has endured his treatment of Sivakami for her sake, but his anger on her behalf is bright and ready.
JANAKI HAS THE SONG GOING THROUGH HER HEAD-the theme from Saraswati, the summer’s big hit movie, starring Bharati, music by Vani. Gopalan’s nephew was singing it as they waited on the train platform this morning; she heard someone humming it as he passed by her on the way to the lavatory at the end of the car.
Yesterday morning she had clipped two more articles to add to her stack of six about the movie. She has nearly a hundred articles about Bharati, collected over the years, clipped and pressed in books, like blooms from a path not taken. Both of yesterday’s repeated the now well-known story of how Bharati grew up listening to “Sri Vani” play, sitting in the mango tree behind Sivakami’s house. The media circulated and recirculated romanticized images of the future star as a child, sitting on a sturdy branch, ankles crossed, eyes closed and hands miming at playing her own veena in time to the notes emanating from the forbidden household, until dusk, or dark, or until a servant maid fetched her firmly home.
Her co-star, an actor rumoured to have political aspirations, was quoted in one of yesterday’s articles.
“This unforgivable and humiliating segregation is the tragic fact even in today’s village Brahmin quarter, all over Tamil Nadu. Sri Vani and her husband, Sri Vairum, are among the very few upper-caste persons willing to welcome their own non-Brahmin neighbours into their homes. How fortunate for all of us that they welcomed Bharati, that little girl hidden like some unspoken shame in the woods behind the house where Sri Vairum himself grew up! Would that the rest of Tamil Nadu’s upper-caste bigots could cast aside their false race pride as Sri Vairum and Sri Vani have done! We must make it clear they have no choice.”
No choice, no choice… The words sing in Janaki’s ears with the rocking of the train, filling her with anger and disgust at politicians and actors-all the same, in her mind. The articles have actually downgraded her caste background, compared with when they first started writing about hers! Fomenting discontent. It’s practically fashionable to be lower-caste these days, she sniffed, mentally. No understanding of the village-of the mutual dependence and respect. Look at Muchami! He has had everything he could want-more than most Brahmins! Would he have had the chance to learn Sanskrit in that actor’s Tamil Nadu? Brahmins are the servants of society. Why is all of India out to get us?
Greed, she thinks, nothing more than that. She lifts an arm around her daughter, reading a novel on the seat beside her, pinches her cheek. “Always reading,” she whispers. “College girl, college girl.”
Thangajothi doesn’t look up but snuggles into her side. Amarnath and Sundar sit on a newspaper on the train floor, playing jacks. Janaki counts the baggage on the rack above them and below their bench. A dozen pieces, same as when they left Pandiyoor. All is in its place and soon they will arrive in Cholapatti, where the fragmented world becomes briefly, yearly, whole again. She sighs and feels her ire dissipating, grudgingly soothed by anticipation.
Kamalam comes to fetch Sivakami. “Amma! Janaki Akka’s here!”
Sivakami, slicing bitter gourd as she squats by a blackened, bubbling rice pot, folds the blade down into its block and, pushing herself to standing, sets it on a high shelf, out of the reach of toddlers. She tries to catch her breath against the pain flexing through her lower back and right leg. While sitting, she can almost believe she is forty again, but this pain plagues her whenever she tries to stand, walk or lie down, so much so that she has been tempted, for a couple of years now, to give up those activities.
Kamalam makes anxious, sympathetic sounds as she waits for Sivakami to recover, but as soon as Sivakami is able, she impatiently shoos Kamalam along to greet her sister. She rejects Kamalam’s hand, held out to help, out of pride, not because she’s madi: she will have to take another bath today because she intends on hugging Janaki and the children.
Thangajothi feels the gossamer folds of Sivakami’s sari flutter against her face, so different from the stiff, coloured silks and cotton blends that her mother wears. Sivakami’s sari could be woven from spider webs, she thinks as her great-grandmother embraces her, seeing her hand through the pallu and inhaling Sivakami’s soft-sour scent of rice and age.
She watches her mother’s familiar transformation as Janaki inquires aggressively about everyone’s health and whereabouts. Thangajothi has seen this every summer of her life but only recently begun to understand it: here, Janaki sheds the deferential diplomacy of the daughter-in-law and gets bossy. She’s the second-eldest sister now, and a child of this house.
Thangajothi, feeling shy, makes similar but politer inquiries, as she has been trained to do. Kamalam arrived, some days earlier, with her three children. Visalam’s first daughter is pregnant and has come here for her delivery, though she will be attended by a nurse, and no one will complain or even look askance. Saradha will come from Thiruchi any day, bringing Raghavan, who is living with her as he finishes college at St. Joseph ’s. Krishnan is teaching at a small college in Salem and lives there with Radhai and her family. They are also expected. And Laddu never left Cholapatti; he had finally married in 1953, and Vairum helped him to buy the house next door when Murthy died, leaving no heirs. His wife and children spend nearly as much time in Sivakami’s house as in their own, and Muchami plays with those children as he did with Thangam’s, though he is too old now to take them all the way back to his own village every afternoon.
Within days, Thangajothi knows, the house will hum and throb. She is more excited than usual: Shyama will come, at some point, for a week or so-her favourite cousin. He had left Pandiyoor at the start of the last school year, sponsored by Baskaran to study in Thiruchi. Infuriated that a boy so obviously bright was doing so poorly at his studies, Baskaran had sent him to stay with Janaki’s sister Saradha, to attend the same high school as her sons for tenth standard-a crucial year, if one were to go further. Shyama, as though he had had something to prove, had excelled in his new school, and Baskaran had rewarded him with a summer holiday in Cholapatti. He will stay with Gayatri, his relative. Thangajothi had missed him terribly, despite his brief visits home. She had been hoping he might already be here.
But Sivakami is excited for another reason. “Vairum is bringing the children,” she tells Janaki, whose expression changes, as Thangajothi watches, from happiness to circumspection. “The boys will receive their poonals here. Did you hear, Janaki? He is bringing Vani and the children, to spend time with you all!”
Even as Sivakami leans toward Janaki, her lined face lit with excitement, her voice quavering a little, Janaki catches sight of Muchami, listening from the garden door, his expression suggestive of pessimism and pain. When he notices Janaki watching him, he smiles at her and ducks away. Janaki might have been able to believe that Vairum had finally decided to stop punishing his children and his mother unfairly by keeping them apart, had she not seen Muchami. Though she has never articulated it, she is accustomed to seeing Muchami share her grandmother’s feelings. Today, she sees her own feelings mirrored in her old friend’s face: doubts about Vairum’s motivations and anger over her grandmother’s long years of suffering.
Now, in charge of preparations for the poonal ceremony until Saradha arrives, she finds she can’t fully enjoy herself. Vairum was apparently too caught up in city life to have yet granted his sons the holy thread. She wonders how he will justify putting his sons through this most Brahmin of transformations, given his political stances. Will he say he is doing it because he can, back on the Brahmin quarter where he was humiliated and uncasted by his brother-in-law? Will he say he believes in education of any kind, and that his sons need to know their identity even if they must critique it?
Regardless, Janaki sees it as an opportunity for a real celebration of Brahmin values-just what the community needs about now-and tries to throw herself into the work with renewed enthusiasm.
On a morning two days after their arrival, Thangajothi pokes her head into the vestibule and calls out, “Gayatri Mami! It’s Thangajothi.” She holds a P. G. Wodehouse novel, which she had borrowed the previous afternoon from Minister’s library. She enters the dim cool of the main hall, in the middle of which Minister lies on a four-poster bed. Gayatri lumbers from the rear of the house, and hands a stainless steel saucer with some snacks to Thangajothi.
“Yes, child, here. Sit.” She looks a little nervously at her husband, who is so thin as to look like a long wrinkle in the woven bedsheets.
Minister says nothing as Thangajothi obediently squats against one of the pillars.
“Shyama came last night,” Gayatri shares conversationally.
Thangajothi stands again. “He’s here? Upstairs?”
“Of course. All you kids-can’t stay away from the books, huh?” Gayatri sounds disgruntled.
Thangajothi thinks she must be lonely: none of their sons live here any more. One by one, they had all got jobs elsewhere. Yesterday, Thangajothi had overheard Gayatri telling Janaki how her sons in Madras had been asking their parents to join them there, and how Minister refused.
Thangajothi feels bad-she likes Gayatri, but the main reason she comes to their house is for the books. Now she’s feeling worse, because all she wants to do is bound up the stairs to see Shyama.
“The time!” Minister cries from among the bedclothes, and Thangajothi, Gayatri and the nurse, who is squatting in a corner, all jump. “What is the time, ma?”
“Eleven o’clock,” Gayatri responds, looking at the floor. “Go and come,” she says to Thangajothi, waving her away. “Take your tiffin here, with Shyama, this afternoon.”
That morning, a day after all of Thangam’s children have assembled in Cholapatti, Vairum and Vani arrive. It has seemed, to Sivakami, an interminable wait. She is so proud as she comes to the door to meet them. She makes no effort to conceal her happiness, or herself. This is the new way, she thinks, a little giddy as she watches them get out of their shiny black automobile, and then backs into the house to admit them. I, too, can be modern, she thinks, though she’s still too shy to meet the neighbours’ eyes.
In the dim hall, which smells of cool brick, camphor and holy ash from the many who have performed morning prayers that day, Vani’s sons clutch at her sari as she falls to do namaskaram for Sivakami. Vairum gestures toward Sivakami’s feet and his head, and says to his sons, “This is my mother.”
Sivakami advances a few steps, reaching toward the children as Vani plucks the boys off of her hips. Muchami, standing at the garden door, turns away from what he sees, what Sivakami can’t and doesn’t want to see: Vairum is not smiling and still has not said a word to her.
The boys receive kisses from Sivakami, stiff with terror as though she is a wraith. The aunts and cousins flood forward to engulf them in a warm tide, and Sivakami smiles, brittle and joyous.
Holding her paavaadai up with the hand clutching the book, bracing herself with her other hand against the wall of the stairwell, Thangajothi climbs to the second level. She crosses a room full of recliners and coffee tables whose random placement confirms their long disuse. She has often lingered in this room, searching out Minister’s face in the many framed photos: large groups of sombre men, faces dark between white caps and kurtas, apart from the occasional white man in a suit, or Indian man in a uniform or princely regalia. The photos are annotated with occasions and purposes, sometimes with the names of all the men present, written in English.
This time, though, she goes purposefully to the original library. Shyama’s not in there, so she goes through to the walkway. As she traverses it, she hears through the skylight, which gives onto the main hall, Minister’s voice. “The time, ma! Tell me the time.”
At the end of the corridor, she pushes open the door to another small room. It is, like the library, filled with books-lining the walls, in piles on the floor-mixed in with a jumble of other curiosities: an Eastman Kodak camera like a jack-in-the-box, a non-functioning radio, an empty binoculars case, all home to dust mites, scuttling spiders and an occasional scorpion; a stuffed mongoose with the tail peeling back to show wires and straw; posters of foreign movie stars; a hinge-lidded tin with printing on the side: “500 Scissors Cigarettes,” and another dented tin bearing the puzzling “Peek Freans.” Nothing has moved, from one summer to the next, in the years since Thangajothi first came upon them. Last year, she picked up a flyer for something called the “Self-Respect Ramayana,” because it was exactly like another she had found in the attic room at Sivakami’s house and used as a bookmark, until she lost it. This time, she stuck the flyer under some books on the bookcase, and it was still there when she returned.
Shyama turns from the shelves and indicates the book in her hand with his chin. “What have you got there?” He speaks as though they had just seen each other at breakfast, not as though they had seen each other only twice in the last year. He is taller, his voice suddenly deep, the skin of his temples and neck bubbled with acne. Thangajothi holds him her book out to him, feeling tongue-tied. “Oh,” he says. “Good, no?”
She sneezes from the dust. “Yes, very. What have you got?”
He holds it out to her and turns back to the shelves. Confessions of a Thug, by Meadows Taylor. She had seen it and passed it over for no particular reason, and now is mad at herself: she would have liked to have read it first and recommended it to him. She goes back to the main library, Shyama following, and puts the Wodehouse back on the Wodehouse shelf. She picks up Sivakami’s Vow, a novel by Kalki Krishnamurthy that she had read the year before. Her mother had read it when it was first serialized, bought the book for Thangajothi, and read it again when Thangajothi finished: a 1,000-plus page historical epic about a dancing girl named Sivakami who wants to marry a king. Thangajothi’s uncle Raghavan had teased his grandmother: a courtesan named Sivakami! Raghavan wasn’t much of a reader, though, and only Janaki, among the sisters, has finished it. She has told Thangajothi that Kalki is one of Vairum’s acquaintances in Madras, that she herself met the great writer on her first visit to the city.
They wander back into the old salon to sit, facing slightly away from one another, reclined in the stillness of Minister’s salon. Only the faraway sounds of Gayatri’s kitchen, and the flip and ruffle of their own pages, break the hush.
The next morning, Shyama enrages Janaki by telling her, when she talks about the big poonal celebration, that he has removed his holy thread. “What do I need a caste marker for? I believe in education for everyone.
“So do we!” Janaki splutters inadequately, and Shyama shrugs.
Sivakami is sitting in the kitchen doorway now, watching them eat, and Thangajothi notices that Muchami, too, has come to squat in one of the doors to the garden. After returning from Cholapatti last summer, Thangajothi had bragged to Shyama of how progressive her great-grandmother’s household is in its treatment of the servants and dared him to find another Brahmin household that so elevated the staff, where servants are permitted to be in view during meals, where they refuse to touch the bedding, where they have actually been given Sanskrit education!
“Elevated!” he had scoffed. “Brahminized, you mean! What’s wrong with their own customs? What’s wrong with Tamil? What’s so polluting about bedsheets, for God’s sake? You’re brainwashed, all of you.”
“All of us?” she had shouted, surprising herself out of a tight silence. “What about you? You’re as Brahmin as we are and all you do is parrot your father, anyway.”
As they end their meal now, she watches him observe all the Brahmin conventions-drinking water without touching his mouth to the tumbler, ringing his banana leaf with water against the pollutions of saliva and cooked food-whether out of mere habit or so as not to offend. She wonders if he remembers that conversation.
Having heard that the musical star of Saraswati is visiting, dozens of neighbours drop in daily to Sivakami’s house, cluster in the hall, on and around the veranda, clamouring for the famous theme song. Sometimes Vani obliges, rousing a cheer with the opening bars and then a singalong, especially at the chorus. More often, she plays something else, and all those gathered look trapped. When she finishes, they try without success to talk to her about the movie.
When Thangajothi goes out the back, she often sees as many as eight or ten children sitting in the trees beyond the courtyard wall, and others, adults, squatted on the ground. She has heard her mother proclaiming her satisfaction with this turn of events. “Good for them. None but Brahmins ever take an interest in classical music. I think it’s excellent that the lower classes have finally come to it, even if it had to be because of a film.”
Thangajothi winces at her tone. Most of the time, she doesn’t think much of Vani’s playing and it’s not hard to tell that most of those in the living room and out the back don’t know what to make of it either. Her mother does, though, which fact Thangajothi respects.
Janaki sits in the main hall, working a kingfisher in bright threads. She peers too closely at it and wonders if it is obvious that she is sulking and trying to avoid talking to the visitors. She just can’t decide if these people deserve to listen to Vani. This is the Brahmin-quarter majority and they are no fonder of her music than they were ten and twenty years ago. But they should humble themselves here, thinks Janaki, those same neighbours who disgraced Vairum, and who have, resentfully, sold him their properties at inflated prices. The tide has turned a little, though, with the rise of a new generation that knows only of Vairum’s magnanimity. He never stays to visit the Cholapatti Brahmins in their homes, but it seems the chill of estrangement from the quarter may have abated a little. The simple charm of passing time.
Kamalam sits beside her, teaching palanguzhi to her four-year-old twin sons. One of the boys is prone to gestures of theatrical generosity; the other is conniving; both are disinclined to stick to the rules. (They are in the swell of their personalities, in their purest moment; they are impossible.)
Raghavan had been trying to help Kamalam but got bored and left to see if his older nephews were up for cricket. Janaki had charged her own sons with making sure they were all back for lunch. Krishnan reclines, his head on Radhai’s knee, both sweetly attentive to the music. Laddu’s wife is helping in the kitchen and Laddu will stop in for supper after work.
A horde of hollering boys-with Vairum’s sons nearly, but not yet quite, at the front of the pack-swarm down the stairs, through the hall and out to the street.
Thangajothi comes to sit beside her mother, and without saying anything, slumps into her and opens a book. Janaki sets down her embroidery with a sigh. All the poonal preparations are done; the ceremony is the next morning. She pushes Thangajothi’s book up to see what she is reading: Kalki, Sivakami’s Vow. She smiles.
This is as close as we can come now, she thinks, to what it should be like. Her sentimentality smarts and she enjoys the sting. There are the missing-she feels the loss of Sita’s darkness as much as Visalam’s light-but this is close: Sivakami in the kitchen, Gayatri and Muchami lingering at her sides, Vani playing her veena, Vairum out on business, and the rest of them, Thangam’s children, and her children’s children, looked after, safe and happy.
During the poonal ceremony, Sivakami gets occasional glimpses of Vairum’s sons at the ceremonial fire, as she stands at the kitchen door. Laddu and Vairum, shirtless, in silk dhotis and shoulder cloths, huddle under cloths to pass on to the little boys the prayer for illumination, but as Sivakami’s eyes blur from the smoke, she is seeing another little boy, who had no father, receiving his holy thread, earnestly repeating the syllables an uncle is speaking into his ear-a little boy who was happy then, and proud, inducted into the traditions of his caste, surrounded by his cousins.
She turns away to wipe her eyes and sees Muchami, crouched at the far end of the courtyard, his head in his hands. A mild anger shudders briefly through her, riding a snake of puzzlement: why can’t he feel happy for them? Clearly, Vairum’s participation in this ceremony-of all ceremonies!-shows his desire, his need, to be accepted into the fold of his community, to be together with the family he supported. If not for Vairum’s intelligence, his know-how, where would they be now? Yes, they suffered at times, but for this, to gather like this, prosperous and happy.
How sad for Muchami, she thinks, that he cannot see what I see. No one ever saw what she did: that tender child. (A gem, a coin, all elbows and iron.) A mother should know. All is forgiven.
Janaki lays down banana leaves for the third round of feasting, when the family can finally eat. Visitors from up and down the quarter are leaving for their homes with promises to return to hear Vani play that afternoon.
The family members are seating themselves when a car pulls up outside the front door. Vairum looks unsurprised, and Janaki thinks he is smiling slightly. Perhaps some business associate is coming to meet him here? That would be strange; he always has them meet him at his Kulithalai office.
No, it’s a woman. Janaki can’t make her features out against the light, until the visitor steps into the hall’s cheery gloom. A shout fades in from the street. “Bharati! It’s Bharati!”
So it is.
Vairum is striding up to greet Bharati. She holds her palms together. “Namaskaram, Mama. Namaskaram, Mami. Namaskaram.” She offers graceful greetings to Gayatri, who, though gaping, reflexively puts her own palms together and then brings them apart an inch or two, unsure of what to do.
“How are you?” Bharati greets Sivakami’s grandchildren, who stand and stare. She directs a particular greeting at Janaki: “Are you well?”
Janaki waggles her head with fearful rapidity, and Bharati gives her a hard and subtly victorious smile.
“So good you could come home, Bharati.” Vairum is waving her toward the line of banana leaves. “You must take lunch with us.”
“Oh, not necessary, I…”
“I insist,” he says. “Sit. Sit.”
Kamalam stands stock-still, while Saradha splutters and turns half away from the sight of a devadasi preparing to take food in her grandmother’s home. But it’s not her grandmother’s home, Janaki is reminded as she catches Vairum eye-it’s his. He doesn’t even bother holding her glance. They have no right to challenge him-they are guests in his home. And before this, he gave them everything good. They owe him their lives.
Sivakami sees the visitor arrive-a sophisticated-looking young woman, not one she recalls having met before. She sees Vairum usher her to eat. There is plenty, of course. Saradha comes to fetch another banana leaf but doesn’t appear to hear Sivakami asking who their guest is. Sivakami looks for Muchami, but he has gone. She beckons Gayatri back, signalling, a fist with thumb extended: “Who is she? What’s going on?”
“Bharati, Akka.” Gayatri can barely meet her eye at first, then looks at her with concern. “It’s Bharati, the star of the movie, of Saraswati.”
Sivakami looks into the main hall. Vairum is watching her.
SARADHA, KAMALAM, JANAKI AND RADHAI ferry out the food, carrying vessels from the kitchen out to the main hall and back, stiff and regular as figures moving in and out of a cuckoo clock. They serve payasam, appam, pickles, curries, pacchadis, applam, rice, sambar. Somehow, though, they are all present to witness the first fistful of rice Bharati lifts from the leaf to her mouth.
There-there.
The house is defiled.
She lights them with her famous smile. “Delicious. My compliments.”
The four sisters look back, variously, but all unsmiling. A flash-bulb pops-a reporter from Anantha Viketan who must somehow have caught wind of the visit. As though his intrusion has broken some film-thin membrane between public and private, the life of the home and the life of the street, neighbours pour back in.
“The devadasi’s daughter,” Gayatri finishes gently, and Sivakami sees a low-caste intruder take rice in her home, in front of her mother-in-law’s Ramar, in front of all the neighbours.
Vairum is still watching Sivakami. Now he smiles.
Muchami has gone around to the garden door. Too late, he sees. He looks toward the kitchen. Sivakami doesn’t look at him. She is seeing for herself now. Muchami hangs his head.
Thangajothi has never met her mother’s father. She knows him only from the wedding photo hung on the pantry wall. She has spent hours looking at that photo; she used to ask to have it taken down for her. She thinks her grandparents the handsomest couple she has ever seen. Since last year, though, she has stopped looking at it so much. It’s true that when these photos are taken, the subjects hardly know each other and often look shy and mildly surprised to find themselves in the same frame. In the photo of her grandparents, though, each looks wholly alone. It has begun to make her sad.
From the back of the salon, she watches the hubbub of neighbours part to make way for a man she now recognizes as her grandfather. His high and distracted beauty has not altered, though his face is lined and hair grey. He flutters and booms greetings to the crowd and the family.
Janaki feels faint. Bharati looks at her, alarmed, and makes the same signal as Sivakami did-a fist shaken, thumb out, emphasized with a thrust of the chin-What’s going on?
Janaki signals her back with a hand flipped, fingers spread, bewildered and accusatory: How would I know?
“Ho, ho!” Goli is making his way through the crowd of Cholapatti Brahmins, offering namaskarams. “Yes, quite a while!” he says to one stiff greeting. “Very well!” he answers another coldly formal inquiry. “Very, extraordinarily, well.”
Goli’s clothes are worn, he carries no briefcase, no walking stick. Janaki cannot imagine where he has been all this time, and with whom, and shudders to think what he has been doing. She wonders if he held on to his job with the government.
Vairum has risen. He walks across the room to the garden door, and Muchami steps back as he holds his hand out over the ground and washes it with a tumbler of water, all without taking his eyes off Goli. He wants to see Goli see Bharati, Janaki realizes. He has set this up.
“And you, Vairum!” Goli crows. “Your man told me you had come around and I’m here to tell you bygones are bygones, but don’t think you’re getting off that easy.” He spies lunch. “Don’t mind if I do…” As Bharati rises, though, he halts cartoonishly, mid-stride, and then tries to fling himself back into the crowd. “Is that the time? Duty calls, my friends! Lovely to have seen you!”
But the crowd won’t part. Janaki sees faces she doesn’t know-has Vairum enlisted help? Goli can’t get out.
“Amma!” Vairum calls. “Come! Some visitors!”
Sivakami thinks she hears Goli’s voice. It can’t be. He hasn’t come since Thangam died; her sons do the yearly death anniversary rites for her. Sivakami has trained herself not to think of him.
She peeps out from the pantry. It is Goli. Well, she must feed him. She sees Muchami, at the garden door. Why doesn’t he look glad? She is glad. Goli can do no more harm now, and what does no harm does good. Children need a father. Why is she shaking like this? And are these tears running down both her cheeks? She can’t tell: one of her cheeks feels numb.
“Amma!” Vairum calls.
Vairum has called her “mother.” How long has it been? All is forgiven.
“Come!” he calls.
Now: no Brahmin widow walks through her main hall in front of guests. How the neighbours would talk! But Sivakami is not the woman she used to be. Her house is not defiled-this is not her house. And she left her fear walking a train track near Thiruchi. She can’t lose her son the way she lost her husband: without a word. She goes to Vairum.
“This is a great day!” Vairum proclaims to all assembled, arms outstretched, as Sivakami stands hunched beside him, twisting her fingers. “Finally, all my prolific brother-in-law’s known kin are gathered.”
Bharati, ashen, crosses the room to the garden door. Muchami fetches a brass jug of water and pours water for her to wash her hands. Janaki throbs in sympathy with her friend’s embarrassment. Vairum should not have invited her, she thinks, but Bharati never should have accepted.
Sivakami looks very small as Vairum leans toward her. “You have, in marvellous conscience, sheltered and raised all of my sister’s children by this man, but this man has at least one more child and she, too, deserves to be recognized, don’t you think, Amma? You, who have such concern for the children of this village, who has ensured all of them survive their passage safely into this great world? Can we make up for what this cad has wrought? He killed my sister, robbed me of caste, never gave his children any more than a paltry legitimacy and didn’t even give Bharati that. Let us make it right. Let us admit the truth. All together.”
Sivakami can feel a numbness spreading through her left side but not quickly enough to prevent her from understanding what he has said. He hates me, and now she sees why. This poor girl had no father; none of Thangam’s children had a father; her son had no father. It was all my fault; she deprived them all of the fathers they should have had. Vairum had no children-also my fault. She never should have permitted the marriage with Vani. He was young; I should have decided for him what was best.
Yes, let me shoulder the blame. Maybe now Vairum will stop blaming himself, throw away the knife he has used all his life to cut his own great heart into bits.
She sees Muchami step into the main hall, open his mouth and raise a hand, but then she sees him collapse.
He has brought us here, thinks Janaki, running forward with everyone else, to shatter us.