The toss of a lemon, p.6
The Toss of a Lemon, page 6
Hanumarathnam has only occasionally gone to market-when he was young, and a servant was sick or perhaps away at a wedding. Every time, he wanted to bully exactly the way Muchami is doing now, especially when dealing with those merchants known to be particularly bad cheats. His caste consciousness would not permit him: such behaviour seems ungracious from Brahmins. It provokes jokes about mercenary priests, and Hanumarathnam is particularly sensitive owing to his role as village healer. If he were perceived as grasping, the villagers would still come to him for medicine, but his relationship to them would be altered by a lessening of confidence in the purity of his goodwill.
So he never tried, though sometimes he intervened on someone else’s behalf, because merchants cheat poor people even more than they cheat the rich and Brahmins. Hanumarathnam reflects momentarily that a poor person working for a middle-class household has the greatest bargaining advantages-the power to purchase in quantity and the knowledge and status of the street.
When they return from the market, Hanumarathnam comes in by the back courtyard, washes his feet, then proceeds to the veranda to sit on a jute-strung daybed and contemplate the Hindu newspaper.
Muchami enters the courtyard behind him and empties the bag of vegetables on the platform behind the kitchen. Sivakami squats to do the sorting. This was a ritual, enacted by her mother and various servants, that she had observed daily as a girl and looked forward to assuming: the mistress criticizes the servant’s choices, goes into shock at the expense, has all the fun of market banter without leaving the house.
But when, in her first week as mistress of her own house, Sivakami launched some imaginative criticisms of the produce, the old servant barely glanced at her. He just put the change down on a corner of the platform and wandered away, leaving her mumbling to fade into silence. The day following she asked him to stay while she inspected the goods, and he complied but shrugged at bruises and rot, claimed not to remember prices and was altogether no fun.
Now, unexpectedly, Muchami addresses her. “Beans are better than most. It’s not been a good season for beans. Don’t know how he gets such good beans, considering he’s such a coward.”
Sivakami is too surprised to respond. She has been silent with him till now, resenting him, hating what he represents. Now, she’s uncomfortably aware of her reluctance to risk a remark that might cause him to stop talking. He doesn’t seem to mind her silence and continues, “His wife and son are always ganging up with her sister and the sister’s husband. They ridicule him until he cries and runs away to sleep. They all live with him-he’s too scared to stop them. Must spend all his time finding these great beans.”
Sivakami, though still trying to be unfriendly, can’t help asking, “Why is he so scared?”
“Because he’s a coward, like I said. Look at these eggplants. I know they’re not gorgeous, but they were a free gift owing to my acquaintance with the seller. He used to beat up on me because I was a friend of his younger brother. Now he won’t try it because I’m working for you, Amma. Just cut off the bad parts, there’ll still be lots. Where do you want the lentils?”
He bounces the sack of lentils off one knee and then the other while waiting for her answer. She hurries to fetch the canister, and he puts away the other dry goods and the kerosene.
That night, Hanumarathnam talks to her about their newest employee. He is satisfied that he has chosen well this caretaker for his wife and children but is also aware that he may be giving this boy some power. He likes the idea that he has the power to give it and thinks Muchami will still know his place.
In those early weeks, Hanumarathnam continues the work of checking on crop yields and collecting the rent while Muchami tags along. The servant has adopted Hanumarathnam’s posture and stance, the slight stoop, the outward turn of the knees. He has found himself a walking stick, which he uses to dredge plantain leaves from irrigation tracts. He leans on it as he watches Hanumarathnam leaning on his own stick and talking to the peasant cultivators. Muchami’s dhotis become whiter, his hair smoother, and he adopts Brahmin turns of phrase and pronunciations, adding curlicues to a manner of speech that had already sounded a bit forced among his social equivalents.
Many of the tenants, along with Muchami’s uncles and mother, find his affectations silly, but the few who are impressed give him more than enough reason to continue. He begins monitoring and collecting on his own. Though he is tougher than Hanumarathnam, he never bullies the tenants. In the market, people expect to be bullied, but bullying peasant farmers in front of their homes is gauche. His family and close friends call him the landlord’s goonda, but they are only teasing. Muchami knows this and doesn’t get defensive; instead he swaggers around and pretends to be a real goonda. He knows he is successful.
Sivakami, too, senses that Muchami hopes to be something more than most among his class, and wonders if they might be of help along that path. She also finds herself, daily, looking more and more forward to his reports from his rounds, less and less inclined to hide her amusement. She has a few friends, Brahmin matrons like herself, who drop by from time to time, but they seem to tell the same few stories, about saris, deaths and slights ad nauseam. These things do interest her, in the candyfloss way of pulp novels. It is wholesome gossip, because everyone does it, and because it comes with judgments: proper versus improper, decent versus indecent. In contrast, Muchami’s tales are meaty and illicit. He tells her everything about people she knows and those she will never meet. He is more respectful when speaking about Brahmins but makes no attempt to censor himself-in fact, he is encouraged by Sivakami’s attention into increasingly outrageous mimicry.
One day a few weeks after he starts work for them, Muchami is sorting through the produce in the back courtyard by the well, entertaining Sivakami, who sits on the platform behind the kitchen with the baby in her lap, by commenting on the vegetables in the voice of their preferred kerosene merchant. The kerosene seller has a strange condition: his voice, every few phrases, shoots up briefly and involuntarily into a falsetto. Muchami maintains a deadpan monologue on the vegetables, not breaking rhythm at all for the falsetto interludes. “Okra aren’t bad, though he kept slipping these little-little rotten ones in among the good. I called him on it, picked them out and said, ‘Who’re you trying to fool?’”
Sivakami, after a brief attempt to restrain her giggles, breaks down. Muchami starts adding effeminate prancing to the high-pitched bits, still with no break in work or words, until Sivakami is nearly collapsing with laughter.
Glancing up, she sees Hanumarathnam has come to the pantry entrance, attracted by her laughter. He looks amused and curious, but Muchami stops when he notices his employer and stands with his head bowed. Sivakami, too, stops laughing, and Hanumarathnam says, “What? Why so solemn as soon as I show up?” They smile at him shyly and he withdraws with affectionate exasperation, but Sivakami feels sick with anger now, at herself, and even more, at Hanumarathnam. Muchami tries to resume clowning a little but quickly sees that she is no longer in the mood.
How dare my husband trick me into accepting this? Sivakami stomps inside and puts the baby in the cloth hammock where he sleeps, rocking it silently and a little too hard, until the baby’s wails jolt her into slowing down and beginning a lullaby. She takes a deep breath. Here I am, acting normal, after my husband has said he is going to die.
WEEKS ACCELERATE INTO MONTHS. Sivakami and Hanumarathnam’s son has come to be called Vairum, “diamond,” in contrast to Thangam’s gold. One of Hanumarathnam’s sisters created the nickname, when, holding the baby, she said with a little shiver, “Ooh-look at how his eyes glitter-so cold!” She stopped, suddenly aware of how Sivakami might take this. An elder sister-in-law didn’t really need to be concerned with Sivakami’s feelings, but she didn’t want to offend her little brother. “Your little diamond!” she added in a shrill disclaimer, and Sivakami accepted the suggestion, choosing to pretend the entire comment had been in goodwill and good taste. (The sister-in-law had not yet discovered ice, or Vairum might have been named for that chill substance.)
Vairum is a very different child from his elder sister. Unlike Thangam, he craves attention. He complains loudly until he is picked up and comforted. Fortunately, also unlike Thangam, he is the normal weight of a skinny Indian baby, and so not a great burden to his tiny mother. While Vairum’s stare contains unmistakable longing, no one but Sivakami and Thangam is tempted to carry and cuddle the boy with the pinched features and cold, dark eyes. Tempted least of all is his father. Hanumarathnam keeps very occupied with healing and agriculture, his studies, his training of Sivakami and Muchami. He always has a small joke and a cuddle for his daughter, but nothing for his son. Sivakami holds Vairum tight whenever she can, covering him with kisses and words of adoration. Where Thangam, at six months, nursed six times daily with perfect regularity, Vairum demands the breast capriciously like the little king he is and should be. Sivakami nearly always complies, stopping what she is doing to take him into the room under the stairs, holding him in her lap as he idly sucks and fiddles with her thirumangalyam, the wedding pendants that otherwise are dropped out of sight in her blouse.
On one afternoon, after Vairum finishes nursing, Sivakami is playing with him, lifting him horizontally to blow against his tummy, luxuriating in his baby skin and the rich sound of his giggles. She looks up to see Hanumarathnam, watching through the doorway as though it’s a portal between this life and the next. She holds the baby out to him, exasperated: no matter what is coming, nothing in life is denied to him now. But he takes a step back and she clasps Vairum again to her breast.
She wishes she could talk to Hanumarathnam about the despair and estrangement she sees on his face, but when she tries, she finds she pities him too much. She is grateful she doesn’t have to live with such feelings toward her children; she doesn’t know how she could talk Hanumarathnam into feeling any different. She persuades him a couple of times to hold the child, thinking he can’t help but fall in love if he does so, but Hanumarathnam looks so stiff and helpless that she takes Vairum back. And the little boy’s eyes, so often trained on his father, are full of unreciprocated desire.
Perhaps through some ineffectual cosmic attempt to remedy this injustice, Thangam is as infatuated with her little brother as the rest of the world is with her. She insists on helping her mother bathe the baby; she rocks him, pats him, sings to him, seems oblivious to any child’s existence save his, even while children on the veranda call for her daily.
When Vairum is nearly eleven months old, they shave his hair-it takes three of them, Sivakami, Murthy and Rukmini, to hold him still-and make a pilgrimage to Palani Mountain, where they offer it to the deity. On his first birthday, he is held on Sivakami’s eldest brother’s knee and his ears are pierced. He screams and thrashes so violently that Sivakami wonders if one of the demons who should be placated by these rituals has got the wrong message. Thangam stands close by-she who whimpered as her head was shaved and burbled with silent tears at her own piercing-trying to soothe the baby.
Hanumarathnam, on these days, says nothing. He always turns so as not to have to see the little boy, who watches his father as Thangam watches the baby, and Sivakami watches them all, knowing nothing can compensate for Vairum’s deprivation. None but a father can give a father’s love.
MONTHS SPEED PAST. Hanumarathnam and Sivakami have been married now for almost eight years.
She has been enjoying her new responsibilities. She has known many women who do their families’ accounting and make their financial and strategic decisions. Many wives do these jobs because their husbands are less than competent. The wives’ work is accepted but never acknowledged. She is the first she has known whose husband has trained her at these tasks, shown faith in and approval of her abilities. And with Muchami’s presence already so strong in the fields, her husband’s absence will hardly be noticed out there.
She realizes that she has begun to accept the way he has tricked her into being practical, into living with his death. She hardly recalls the resentment she first had toward Muchami.
And in the night, every night, Hanumarathnam turns to her. They might go through the movements for procreation or pleasure, but on these nights, the fire is fed on fear of death. Sometimes, as Sivakami marches tenderly through the requirements of his siddhic practices, she wonders with each movement, is this the one that will give him long life? She is a Brahmin, she cannot make him into a siddha. She supposes he could become one, if he chose. But then, that would mean renouncing caste, and if he were not a Brahmin, she could not be married to him, so what purpose would that serve?
She often rises after Hanumarathnam’s rough breathing has deepened into post-coital rest. Her sleep now is rare and slight, between her worries and Vairum’s nocturnal wakings. She lights a kerosene lamp and does beadwork by the bad light. Night after sleepless night, contrary to all her mother’s severe warnings, Sivakami finds her sight improves from the exercises. The tiny glass beads dance with the flame, sometimes they seem to her almost to sing, as she sits before the Ramar, working and praying and wondering about the future.
She wonders, if they have more children, another son, maybe things, astrological things, would shift again. But she somehow knows there will be no more children.
She recalls Savitri, that most devoted wife and daughter, whose story is told in the Mahabharata. Savitri had insisted on marrying Satyavan, in spite of all her elders’ objections that he was cursed to die within a year of their marriage. She would not be put off, and when Yama, god of death, came riding his water buffalo to claim Satyavan’s soul, Savitri went after him and, with clever arguments and bulldoggish perseverance, got her husband back.
Sivakami wonders what choice she herself would have made, given these conditions. She admits to herself in the small, bleak hours before morning that, given the choice, despite all she feels for her husband, she would not have chosen to be a widow.
But she was not given the choice. And when the time comes, will she follow Yama’s water buffalo into the netherworld, over rocks and by harsh seas, to reclaim her husband’s soul for his body? She sensibly concludes that all she can do is prepare. Her husband, bless his cursed soul, is doing everything in his power to help her do that. She falls asleep praying for strength.
4. Fever 1904
The years hurtle past them, like rain and parrots, like rice and rose petals.
VAIRUM, NOW TWO AND A HALF, is outside playing under Muchami’s watchful eye. He has grown from a complaining baby into a child who plays alone. He plays energetically and needs many people to populate his games, but since he lacks friends, he uses Muchami for every role. Vairum is fractious, bossy and tiring, but the patient servant generally does whatever the child commands, pretending perfect comprehension of Vairum’s cryptic and sometimes semi-intelligible orders. Muchami is an energetic young man, but Vairum taxes him completely.
Vairum is spoiled. Not just because he’s an only son, though this might have been enough, but because Sivakami pities him. She coddles and cuddles and feeds him extra sweets. He laps it up, going to her many times each day to bury his face in the folds of her sari and thighs.
He has begun to exhaust even Thangam, who continues to love him for reasons of her own. Vairum responds by pinching his sister, pushing her away when she tries to help with his games and then screaming and clinging when she leaves him, once kissing her so violently his tooth breaks her skin. He doesn’t seek her out, though, as if to prove he doesn’t need her the way everyone else does.
In his favour, Vairum is generous to a fault. He never eats treats without first offering others a share, even giving up his own portion if some urchin looks at it with big eyes. He can’t stand for anyone to go without. Even Thangam is never excluded, though she will never take from him. Sometimes, he approaches his father with an offering. Always, his father declines.
It is hard to say whether Vairum is doing this to win friends. If he is, it’s not working: smaller, more timid children are scared of him; larger, bolder children tease him mercilessly; small and large run at him to take whatever delicacy he has on offer, then run away. Vairum cries in a far corner of the house, goes on feeding the opportunistic children and plays with Muchami.
Thangam spends most of her time sitting in the hall or on the veranda. She doesn’t chatter, she doesn’t do handicrafts, she just sits. She is willing and prompt in completing her few chores, and Sivakami is satisfied she will make a good homemaker. If she needs no entertainment, this is an asset.
The little girl has always been quiet, but, since Vairum was born, she has become increasingly so. This could, Sivakami thinks, be owing to Vairum’s demanding nature: Sivakami knows she pays more attention to the boy, but everyone else pays so much attention to Thangam. Neither has Thangam ever shown her parents the passionate affection that Sivakami receives from her son. Once or twice, however, Sivakami thought she saw, mixed in Thangam’s adoring glances at Vairum, some shame, as she herself received from Hanumarathnam the easy fondness he has never been able to bestow on his son.
Most of the neighbourhood considers Thangam’s beauty itself to be a community service. Burnished hair, molten eyes-for Thangam’s sake, many children come to their house. They ask her to come away, to play with them. They touch her golden skin. She smiles a fleeting smile, rebuking, mischievous, skeptical and warm. The children never give up asking and Thangam never goes with them.
The world loves Thangam and does not love Vairum, because Thangam is easy to love and Vairum is not, and people, given the choice, do what is easy.
IT IS THE HOT SEASON. The children of Cholapatti lie moaning, felled by a fever and pox, in rooms all up and down the Brahmin quarter, in huts in the village and fields beyond. Sivakami prays daily to the stone Ramar, guardian of their home, for her children’s safety. She ties extra charms around the children’s necks and wrists. She prays to the goddess Mariamman, who visits houses in the guise of such sickness, by muttering welcomes, because she mustn’t make the goddess angry, and by appeasements, because this goddess is always angry. Despite her precautions, both Thangam and Vairum contract the illness, which has already taken three children in a month.
