WE WERE NOT SHATTERED, but that’s what my mother told me she thought, so I have recorded it here. I myself didn’t know what to think at the time, but having now thought through these events, I suspect that Vairum Mama, in spite of all his disregard for Brahmins, might have thought he was doing something good for Bharati. Vairum was both a man of honour and one governed by his grudges, and certainly a gesture that would both force Goli to do the right thing and take revenge on my great-grandmother for whatever pain Vairum Mama thought she had caused him-it must have been irresistible.
I don’t know what he thought of the aftermath: we were all watching Sivakami Patti, who appeared at first not to be responding. She swayed a little, and the room, which had been silent, started buzzing. Everyone swarmed her, and my uncle Raghavan took her arm firmly and led her to the kitchen to lie down. No one would look at Vairum Mama and I don’t remember what he did, because suddenly there were shouts from the garden door: Muchami was lying on his side, his eyes rolling. I was near the door and saw Vairum pick the old servant up himself and put him in the car. Sivakami Patti would not have seen this. Vairum drove Muchami to a hospital: he had suffered a stroke and lost the use of his left side. It wasn’t until a few minutes after Vairum had left that we all realized Sivakami Patti had also had a stroke, also lost the use of her left side. We had to borrow a car to get her to a hospital. I wonder if Vairum was troubled by not having been the one to look after her in that moment, as he had cared for his sister and all of us.
Others had already largely taken over Muchami’s functions as regarded the lands, as well as occasional repairs and whitewashing of Sivakami Patti’s house. Now they took over responsibility for her one cow and little bit of garden. At least half the year, though, Sivakami Patti would stay with us in Pandiyoor or with one of my aunts. When she was in Cholapatti, one of them would go and stay with her, as much for company as for care: Minister Mama died not three months after that summer, and Gayatri Mami relocated to Madras, where she lived in her eldest son’s house. She never shaved her head or gave up contact with her grandchildren, though: times had changed, and widows didn’t much do that any more. She visited Cholapatti a couple of times after that but would stay with her cousin in Kulithalai. Their sons sold off their house and their few remaining lands, so their family, in that generation, effectively severed all relations to the village. This was already the case for at least four other households on the Brahmin quarter by that time.
I moved to Canada, married to a man who had grown up on the same street in Thiruchi where my Saradha Athai lived. His family, too, had sold their house-to non-Brahmins, as those distinctions became increasingly eroded by economic pressures. Even Pandiyoor’s Brahmin quarter would remain “intact,” as my mother would have it-I would say unintegrated-only a few years more. My future husband’s parents moved into a small apartment, and a few weeks after that, he left for Canada on a graduate scholarship, off to find a means to earn and support his family back in India.
My husband and I would eventually sponsor my twin brothers to emigrate, and they would bring my parents, who had run aground financially along with so many of their peers-the lands gone, the privilege gone with it. We were among the increasing numbers of displaced Tamil Brahmins whose stories were superficially different and fundamentally the same. Many of them brought with them their misguided race pride. They hope that here, we might rise again.
Bharati’s story was different. The Cholapatti revelation never made it into the news-that photographer had not stayed to hear it and the Brahmin-quarter denizens must have held their tongues. Certainly, they had known the rumours all along. A couple of years later, she married a radical journalist and together they started a new magazine of popular opinion, satirical humour and cutting-edge fiction. She and her husband moved to a rambling house in Adyar, near the beach, far from my great-uncle’s house, though I assume they still moved in similar social circles. I doubt they ever spoke about what had transpired that afternoon.
My mother wrote to me of Sivakami Patti’s death in 1966. I received the aerogram weeks after her passing. At that point, Muchami was already several years gone. Sivakami Patti was staying in Pandiyoor when she heard the news of her old servant’s passing and she went immediately to take a ritual bath, dousing herself with water as one does only for the death of a close relative. My mother wrote and told me this, too; I think she had been almost puzzled by her own feelings about Muchami’s death until she saw her grandmother’s gesture.
I remember once, when I was in college, my cousin Shyama came to visit me. He had not gone on to finish his education-despite his performance in tenth, he ran away right after that summer in Cholapatti. He returned five years later, taking us all by surprise, and came to visit Thiruchi, where I was in my final year of a physics degree. My marriage was already arranged; I would be leaving for Canada at the end of the year.
We had gone to my favourite temple, the Rock Fort, climbed to the top and were sitting looking out on the Kaveri plain as he told me about people he had met, movements he had been part of. I wasn’t sure how much to believe-I wanted to delight in his adventures but had an inkling that the truth might be grimmer, or duller, and I preferred merely to hear the story he wanted to tell.
I think it was then that I realized I would need, at some point, to try to tell the events of my family’s life. Because as he spoke, I imagined between us a huge, illustrated book. The illustration showed us, sitting high on a rock temple, the valley of the Kaveri spread below us. The ornate, block-printed text told the story of Shyama’s adventures-as they really were, not as he was telling them. I felt that if I might turn back a few chapters, I would see Shyama and myself as children; a few more chapters and I would see my mother as a child; a few more and I might see Sivakami, coming to Cholapatti as a child bride. Maybe I could cross out some passages and scribble in the margins, make Vairum kind to his mother, or make Hanumarathnam live in spite of his horoscope.
Or maybe I would try, and find I could change nothing on the page, that all I could do was tell it differently, and maybe I would understand it better for that-the story of a world that, while it has not vanished, for those who know how to see, no longer exists for most of us.
And my story, too, may no longer exist for those who lived it, because it is in English and they knew only Tamil, maybe some Sanskrit. In any case, it’s not the story they would have told. The tale has transmuted, passed from my great-grandmother into my mother into me, from old world into new, little piles of ash, little piles of gold, a couple of long-petrified lemons-an inheritance I carry around and read alone as I did those novels of long ago.
So it is that I sit here with you, the book of our lives between us, telling my story, and my people’s, in lands and languages I know but that are not my own.