The Toss Of A Lemon Part 3

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 p.r.o.nunciations, 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 cla.s.s, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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. 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 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 gla.s.s 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, G.o.d 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.

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 ch.o.r.es, and Sivakami is satisfied she will make a good homemaker. If she needs no entertainment, this is an a.s.set.

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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.ddess Mariamman, who visits houses in the guise of such sickness, by muttering welcomes, because she mustn't make the G.o.ddess angry, and by appeas.e.m.e.nts, because this G.o.ddess is always angry. Despite her precautions, both Thangam and Vairum contract the illness, which has already taken three children in a month.

The children lie in the front room for five days with sweats and chills. Each awakens with nightmares. Thangam will be sleeping and flip suddenly onto her back. Her eyelids will shoot open and she will stare at the ceiling as though facing down her fears, lips troubled but silent. Vairum thrashes and lashes out in his sleep, hits himself and howls. He weeps from bad dreams and must be consoled.

Sivakami wipes their small bodies with warm water. When they are chilly, she covers them. When they sweat, she fans them with sprays of neem branches, kept always near sick babies, because neem gives the G.o.ddess Mariamman pleasure and so satisfies her that she feels she may depart. Muchami quietly does what Sivakami does, attending to one child when she tends the other.

Hanumarathnam is behaving very strangely. The village families have come to him for remedies, but he has told them he can do nothing for this sickness. He has never said such a thing before. He even gives his own children a wide berth, though he watches them from a distance. When Sivakami asks him if he is concerned for them, he says no.

One night, as she lies awake listening to their laboured breathing, Sivakami becomes aware that Hanumarathnam, whom she had thought asleep for some time already, is saying something. She quietly asks him to repeat himself, but he continues mumbling. She leans in close, but the phrases are nonsensical to her. She watches him with her dark-sharpened eyes for a while: he is asleep. She rises to take up her beading. She is working six scenes from the child Krishna's life and is midway through the third.

In the morning, she asks Hanumarathnam if he recalls his dreams of the night before.

"I never dream," he replies without looking up from his newspaper.

"You were talking in your sleep last night," she says.

"Why didn't you wake me?" He is already impatient with the conversation, and she reciprocates, "Why should I?"

He sighs. "Did it frighten you?"

"No." The subject is dropped, and Sivakami goes about the morning's ch.o.r.es, mystified and suspicious.

That afternoon, she is attending to the children, praying under her breath continuously. Like all the women in the village whose children are sick, Sivakami has offered a deal to Mariamman, that her children will partic.i.p.ate in the village G.o.ddess's annual festival if only she will remove the scourge. It has been five days, without sign of recovery, but Sivakami has faith yet.

Hanumarathnam is napping on the other side of the main hall. Sivakami starts as his lips begin moving and realizes she has been staring at him for a long time. She rises to move closer and in doing so happens to catches a glimpse beyond the open front door.

The siddhas have come.

The eldest nods as she catches his eye. She is, as always, unhappy to see them. She crosses to her husband, who is muttering softly, intense emotion working his brow, his breath fighting in his nostrils. She takes his shoulder and he startles, panting, sweating, looking around wildly.

"What, dear, what is it?" Sivakami asks. She feels she knows; she feels she is about to cry; she feels a little feverish herself, hot and cold at once.

"I dreamt..." Hanumarathnam is calming. "I dreamt... that you and the children will lead long, healthy lives." He backs away from her to lean against the wall. "And that I will not recover from this fever."

Sivakami stares at him. "You are not even afflicted with the fever."

"I will not recover from it."

"You are not stricken." She is aware of her damp palms, twisting the folds of her sari at her waist. "It doesn't affect adults." In fact, two adults have contracted the pox and have suffered even more than the children did.

Hanumarathnam rises and joins the shadows blocking the light from the door. Sivakami sinks to the floor, still protesting. "You are hale and strong. You never dream. Why should I wake you just because you talk in your sleep?"

He has gone.

In the evening, Muchami comes in through the back. Seeing the main hall empty, he retreats through the rooms to the courtyard. He addresses Sivakami from outside the kitchen door.

"Where is he?"

"Out," she says without looking up, slicing vegetables with alarming speed. The children are asleep in the pantry, where she can watch them.

"Out?" Muchami asks.

"He's out." She sounds as angry as she feels and feels no need to hide this from Muchami. "I don't know when he'll be back."

"Oh..." Muchami nods. "Oh. The siddhas?"

"What else?" She leans out the door to toss some peels into the courtyard. Her face is puffy.

Muchami's eyes narrow. "You aren't crying over this?"

In some other servant, some other household, Muchami's manner might be considered audacious, even insolent, but his are the liberties of those lifelong servants who become closer than family, and more trusted.

"Stupid." Sivakami sniffs wetly, wipes her face on the end of her cotton sari and starts to sob. "I just can't stop. I'm making onion sambar, that's why. When we stop eating onions, I'll stop crying."

"Onions never make you cry," Muchami reminds her gently.

"So I'm crying because it's about time he gave them up!" She rises, slams the blade down into the block and dumps the vegetables into the blackened iron pot on the fire. "After all, he says he's going to die anytime, he should start getting ready for it..."

"You angry?"

"Of course not, don't be ridiculous." She pokes another dung chip into the fire and fans it. "Can't he do as he likes?"

"Sure, he's the husband." Muchami wags his head. "But he shouldn't be taking off and leaving us alone like this."

Sivakami cries harder.

When Hanumarathnam returns, two mornings later, he faces identical resentful glares from both of these souls who adore him.

That night, Hanumarathnam drops a pinch of veeboothi on the small gold tongue of his daughter and the small pale tongue of his son. He places his hand on the head of each. His touch on Thangam is lingering. His touch on Vairum is brief, but the little boy glows rapturous under his hand, and Hanumarathnam's eyes become tender for a second. Then that is over.

Before going to bed, Hanumarathnam gives Sivakami a large packet of veeboothi and instructs her to distribute it among the parents of the village, for all of their children, sick and healthy.

"That should do it," he says. She accepts the packet silently and he lies down to sleep. Siddha medicine Siddha medicine, she thinks, and shudders, but still, she hopes it works.

That night, when he begins mumbling, she puts her hand on his arm to wake him. The arm is very warm, and she feels his forehead and stomach. A fever has taken hold of him, and there are pustules forming on his neck and arms.

Buried Treasure 1904.

A WEEK Pa.s.sES, during which Hanumarathnam never once completely awakens. Word spreads. People drop in constantly, whispering words of pity that wear on Sivakami. Each of the visitors brings some remedy, Ayurvedic compounds from famous pract.i.tioners or family recipes, steeped green leaves or pounded buds, bitter barks or shaven twigs, the resulting broths sweetened with sugar or softened with b.u.t.ter. Sivakami dutifully pours them all down Hanumarathnam's throat. The guests quarrel over their remedies, disagreeing on which is best. Each argues that the other remedies are interfering with the effectiveness of her own. They make a lot of noise and bustle in the house, whose occupants are unaccustomed to such cacophony. Sivakami summons silent endurance. Muchami enjoys the spectacle, until he recalls its cause.

Murthy is particularly aggressive with some veeboothi from the Palani temple; Sivakami lets him administer it to Hanumarathnam himself, in light of their relationship. Hanumarathnam's sisters arrive with accusing eyes and suggestions that Sivakami try all the remedies she has already tried. She does her best not to disagree and to avoid them. She has to believe she has tried everything. She had retained a small amount of the veeboothi Hanumarathnam brought back with him from the forest and administers that too.

It certainly has been effective on the children. Thangam and Vairum are no longer ill. They have returned to their old activities: Thangam sitting out front and being fawned over, Vairum giving orders to Muchami, but they are unsettled by the crowds.

Vairum has a set of rocks he has named for their family: Appa, father, a long thin grey rock; Amma, mother, a slim oval of smooth black rock; Akka, big sister, soft, golden sandstone; Vairum, a small slab of unpolished quartz (it glints in places); Muchami, a great chunk of unfired brick. The rock family spends all its time exploring, usually places a little boy is too small to be permitted or too big to fit. They crouch in the fire under the bathwater. They take daily flights through the air to roll off the roof. Vairum, the smallest family member, once navigated a cow's entire digestive tract. Today, they will explore a small soft spot in the foundation of the house, on the side of the garden.

"Dig," he says to Muchami, handing him a stick. The overworked servant looks at him blankly, pretending, this time, not to understand. Comprehension is a subjective and fleeting art.

Vairum points and stamps his foot, repeating, "Dig! Dig."

Muchami examines the stick and starts using it to pick his toenail. Vairum cuffs Muchami's shin and grabs the stick. Muchami wrests it back. Vairum whines a little, then settles down to watching his good pal Muchami create a little tunnel home, a homey little cave, under the house.

Inside the house, Vairum's aunts are alternately relaxing and rearranging everything. They are fifteen and thirteen years older than Hanumarathnam, and lived with him only a few years before going to their husbands' houses, which perhaps is why they didn't fight harder to take their little brother in when their parents died. Later, they were able to justify it, saying that he received an excellent education and upbringing with their aunt and uncle, who genuinely wanted him, as they would say to one another, and to Hanumarathnam, and to others who hadn't even asked. And of course we soon had small children of our own to care for, the eldest would a.s.sert, with the younger parroting her, and How would we have asked our in-laws for such a favour, and Murthy got to keep his brother! How would we have asked our in-laws for such a favour, and Murthy got to keep his brother! It had worked out so well for all concerned. Annam and Vicchu, his aunt and uncle, had sent him to spend holidays with them from time to time. Since Hanumarathnam's marriage, his sisters had come to visit several times, a thing they had rarely done before. It was as though they needed to a.s.sert their presence in his life a little more, now that they were in danger of displacement. It had worked out so well for all concerned. Annam and Vicchu, his aunt and uncle, had sent him to spend holidays with them from time to time. Since Hanumarathnam's marriage, his sisters had come to visit several times, a thing they had rarely done before. It was as though they needed to a.s.sert their presence in his life a little more, now that they were in danger of displacement.

Visitors continue to arrive, even from neighbouring villages and towns, people whom Hanumarathnam has healed. Not one child in his village is now sick with the fever. Each family will carry out its pledge, to carry fire or milk to Mariamman's temple during her annual festival, yet each grieves the imminent pa.s.sing of the man who came as close to science as any they have known. Sivakami hears their remarks, floating in from the main hall to the kitchen with the tch-tch of clucking tongues.

"Such a shame ..."

"Such a young man ..."

"Oh, what will we do!"

"You know, his first concern was always for us..."

She stays in the kitchen, churning out delicacies to keep their mouths busy so they'll talk less, to keep her hands busy so her heart will forget to break.

Vairum charges in from the garden, looking for his mother, wanting her to come and see how cozy the stone family is, stowed in their cave against the elements. He gallops through the main hall toward the kitchen, but his father's eldest sister grabs his arm. It's nearly yanked out of its socket, so intent is he on the kitchen and so abrupt is the detention.