The Toss Of A Lemon Part 11

The next day, Sivakami can't help confessing her fears to Gayatri, who now takes her daily coffee accompanied by her three sons, the baby a little less than six months old.

"Oh, I know," says Gayatri, nose to nose with her youngest, his black eyes flas.h.i.+ng toothless delight. "When I have girls, I'll just worry about them all the time, like my mother does about me, like your mother did about you. Won't I worry about your sisters, little baby? Won't I?"

Sivakami feels irritated at Gayatri's response-what does she know of it? But later that day, as she readies her daughter's trousseau, she reconsiders and decides Gayatri is right. What is she feeling that every mother has not undergone? She is accustomed to reading her own emotions in Muchami's face and his dour farawayness shows her how much she has come to look like her own mother, powerless over her daughter's fate.

Thangam's in-laws come to fetch her. This is a strange departure from tradition, but they had written to say they wanted to spare her the bother of asking her relatives to escort the girl-since Thangam has no father, either Murthy or Sivakami's brothers would have gone. Sivakami understands that Thangam's in-laws cannot afford the expense of hosting the relatives properly, and she accepts their offer with outward grace and inward resignation.

They have grown thinner in the years since the marriage. Though they have the fair skin and drooping eyelids of the highly bred, their clothes are almost threadbare. This is an occasion calling for grandeur, but Thangam's mother-in-law wears, apart from her wedding pendant, only two measly strands of gold about her neck. Her bangles, earrings and nose rings are perfunctory. Sivakami knows of their financial struggles. Every time she sees her brothers, they ask after Thangam's in-laws, shaking their heads but heartily insisting, "Good people," before going on to gloat-good-naturedly, publicly-over the in-laws' financial incompetence. She hears from them that this once-wealthy family is auctioning off its real estate, taking prices far below the land's worth. "Creditors," the brothers speculate in self-righteous tones as they buy parcels of the in-laws' land on Sivakami's behalf, using the money she had set aside for Thangam's dowry.

The departure blessings, as needed, are done. The cart arrives and is packed.

"Coffee?" Sivakami asks the in-laws, and Thangam catches her eye.

Gayatri laughs and winks at Mari. "Our girl's become corrupt!" She means it as a joke, light-hearted.

Sivakami can't rebuke her daughter in front of her in-laws; it would be a rebuke to them as well. But Thangam has never before drunk coffee. Mari whispers to Sivakami that she should not give her daughter any of the polluting drink, but Sivakami ignores her, thinking, I don't have a daughter I don't have a daughter. Thangam is now someone else's child.

Sivakami brings the coffee in flat-bottomed silver bowls and tumblers, with a half-inch lip around the top. Thangam accepts her coffee from her mother and begins pouring it, tumbler to bowl and bowl to tumbler, mixing from ever greater heights so that it curls and foams: caustic liquid gentled with sugar and milk, like a truth made palatable. Thangam relishes each tongueful as Sivakami watches her, imagining her in faraway places Sivakami will never see. Is Thangam drinking the coffee to postpone the moment of departure? Is she experimenting with this foreigners' drink because she, too, is about to become a voyager?

When she is through, she and her in-laws take their leave. Thangam performs an obeisance for her mother, one her husband should have been there to do with her. Vairum stands to one side, watching woodenly. When Thangam rises, her eyes fill and she steps, almost jumps, suddenly toward her brother, putting her palm on his cheek. Vairum jerks his head as though to clamp her hand there, and then shakes her off. Thangam backs toward the cart, which her in-laws have already mounted. Once more, Sivakami has to shake off some petulance-so uncharitable!-at the sense that her children have an understanding that excludes her.

Muchami hovers until Thangam, too, is seated on a bench in back, then leaps up into the driver's seat and flicks his switch. Little puffs of gold jolt from the side of the cart with each pothole and fall twirling in the sun to the thick dust of the road.

Sivakami turns to her son. "Our family grows smaller to grow bigger."

He gazes at her skeptically. "I don't see how you could have let her go with them."

"You're not talking sense," she says, sounding sharp and liking it. "I didn't 'let' her do anything. Her destiny is written by G.o.d and I am nothing but an executor." She catches her breath against tears.

"If you're not worried, you're stupid. If you are worried, you should do something about it!" Vairum storms past her.

"What can I do about it, son? I am a widow." She is shaking: how dare he speak so rudely to her?

"None of this would have happened if our father hadn't died." He stands at the bottom of the stairs and starts. .h.i.tting his forehead with the heels of his hands. "My fault. It's all my fault."

Sivakami gapes. "Where on earth did you hear that?"

He stops and looks at her. "You think it too." Then he runs up the stairs.

"I do not!" she says after him, and again, "I do not," weakly. She can't bring herself to follow. What can she say?

When he comes down, hours later, for his meal, she still has not thought of a way to broach the subject. She has been able to think of nothing but their exchange, but can't think beyond what he said. She serves him silently. While he is eating, she says gently, "It's no one's fault, Kanna. Or, that is, it's my fault, of course, I'm the wife, and if I..."

She is foundering, but Vairum excuses her. "Don't talk about it, Amma. Forget it."

She obeys, with uneasy relief, and they go about the routines of their days until they establish, in Thangam's wake, new rhythms not unlike the old.

Another Coming of Age 1914.

WHILE MARI HAS BEEN WORKING at Sivakami's house and still living at her mother's, she has pa.s.sed her fourteenth, then fifteenth, then sixteenth birthday, but she has not yet gotten her period. It does happen, sometimes, everyone knows of such cases. It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with her, but Muchami's mother has spent these years glaring at her brother and sister-in-law and making comments : She should have had several grandsons from her son by now. Maybe there's something really wrong with the girl. Maybe her brother has known all along. She might be within her rights to demand another dowry.

But neither Mari nor Muchami has shown any impatience or desire for the situation to alter. Mari works right alongside her husband at times, serves his meals, hears his problems and goes home each evening to her own mother's house.

"How can Mari not be frustrated?" Angamma frequently demands of him. He shrugs and sucks his teeth; she jabs her hand at him. "How can you not be frustrated?"

Finally, when Mari is well past her seventeenth birthday, the miracle occurs. All are surprised, though her parents would never admit that. She's been obediently taking herbal doses and douches for years. They throw a big celebration. Mari herself insists on staying away not only from the temple, but, Brahminically, from all of the guests. Her family finds these pretensions insufferable. But that's Angamma's problem now!

No one has worries like Muchami, though. For most young men, a bride's coming of age announces imminent delights. For Muchami, it represents terror sheer as a veil or a cliff. Most young men would be thrilled to receive a wife after so long, even a thin one like Mari. Muchami gets tenser and tenser.

On the day of Mari's procession from the house of her childhood to the new phase of her life, Muchami disappears again. No one is alarmed, really. All understand this cannot be easy for him, so let him live out his fears alone for a day. Though it would be nice for him to welcome his bride, he has to come home at some point and needn't be present for the ceremonies.

Just as the procession is concluding in a great swirling of vermilion water and tossing of flowers, a naked panic of five young boys come running from the eucalyptus woods, shouting and crying, "Muchami! Muchami!" Out of deference to Muchami's mother and his uncles, no one answers them. They yank the adults' arms, wailing, "Muchami! Muchami!" and are ignored, until one child's mother notices her son's hair is wet. She clamps his shoulder, shakes him and yells, "You've been swimming, haven't you? Huh?" He puts his thumb in his mouth and refuses to look at her, but the other boys are still weeping and shouting. Muchami's youngest uncle has a dreadful premonition. He tears away from the crowd and runs toward the river. One by one, the uncles are swept by dread and peel from the crowd, running.

Angamma stops swirling the arathi arathi and watches them go. The lip of the bra.s.s plate droops until she looks down and sees the vermilion water has all spilled and is running along the ground toward the river. She cries out and drops to her knees, but the water has soaked into the earth. She wipes her hands across the red-veined dust and whimpers. She hurries after her brothers. and watches them go. The lip of the bra.s.s plate droops until she looks down and sees the vermilion water has all spilled and is running along the ground toward the river. She cries out and drops to her knees, but the water has soaked into the earth. She wipes her hands across the red-veined dust and whimpers. She hurries after her brothers.

The youngest uncle wades out into the Kaveri. Muchami, whose body moves like a river weed in the current, is anch.o.r.ed by an arm stuck in a crevice of rock creeping out from the opposite bank. Red radiates from his head in a pump and slap that could be caused by the water or his heart. His eyelids are purple and swollen shut.

The uncle is up to his shoulders in the deadly water, unconscious of risk, when an undertow sweeps him down and away. He fights, as he did as a boy, when the river was forbidden to him as it is to his sons now. He wrestles the river and finds the opposite bank. His brothers, one by one, do the same, except the eldest, who runs puffing to the bridge and crosses there. He arrives as his brothers are climbing out upon the stones, their hearts in their mouths. They free their nephew from the clutch of rocks, lift him from his pale ruby halo, press him to their chests and lay him on the riverbank.

But he is breathing. He coughs and some water runs from his nose and mouth. They start to laugh, in small, tense bursts, like eager dogs, barking and panting. How can this be? Muchami is unconscious, bruised and badly cut, but he is alive. The five little boys had swum the river and now climb the bank to stand beside the uncles. The eldest asks them, "What did you see?"

"He came around the bend-""He wasn't moving. His face was in the water.""Suddenly there was a big swell-""Like a big wave-""It pushed him at the rocks-""It hit his head and flipped him over-""And then we saw his face!""It was Muchami Ayya!""And then we came running-""We ran! We were scared!"

The uncles, too, are still scared, since Muchami, though he is breathing, has not yet opened his eyes.

Angamma arrives, out of breath, and wails, "Does he live?" She is so relieved at the answer that she attacks him and must be pulled off, berating her unconscious son for all his rebellion, all his life. "When you were small, I forbade you to go to the river, but you defied me, you went, and went, until you became an expert swimmer, don't deny it, I know, the proof was when you rescued Gopi Ayya's daughter. So what's the meaning of this? You went to take your bath this morning and forgot to stand up?"

The uncles carry Muchami to his mother's hut, as she trots alongside, still lecturing him. They lay him down in his mother's hut, and as Angamma argues with her brothers about whom to call to treat her son, Muchami's eyes open to bright slits. His bride catches his glance, but he closes his eyes again. She thinks no one else has noticed, and this is proven correct when one self-appointed healer pushes through the crowd, flips Muchami over and begins pounding on his back. Muchami recovers quickly enough to escape much bruising.

Only a few days behind schedule, Muchami and Mari are installed in their hut, adjacent to his mother's. They make their first physical acquaintance as patient and nurse.

One afternoon, while Angamma naps in her own hut, Mari speaks up. "Do you know I don't care if I have children? Of the womb, I mean. I want you to know. Your sisters are having plenty, we can adopt one of theirs."

Muchami laces his arms into a pillow and regards her calmly. He hasn't gone to the fields in days; Sivakami forbade it. Nothing is expected of him as long as he is infirm. He has never taken his ease like this. Mari has just made it easier.

Beyond their thick mud walls, a chanted chorus arises, an obscene ditty with the names "Muchami" and "Mari" filling in the blanks, childish voices that then disperse in foot patter and laughter amazed at its own audacity.

"How can you not want children?" Muchami inquires wryly and Mari laughs, covering her mouth.

"I want respect. I want my husband to be clean and not shame me and not drink. My father is a good man, but I could not cope with the drinking."

"I don't drink."

"I know."

Another burst of children's laughter comes through the window on a heat wave, from far away. Muchami knows he should be silent and grateful and never mention the subject again, but something in Mari's manner makes him persist.

"Doesn't everyone want children?"

"I am a religious person, I don't fight fate. G.o.d has reasons. If I am meant not to bear children, I can be content with this."

For the first time since his mishap, Muchami attempts to rise, but the room tilts and he wobbles down onto his knees before his wife. He casts his eyes down. "I am thankful."

She nods.

Vairum Steps Up 1914.

AT TWELVE YEARS OLD, Vairum thinks little of the past, much of the future. He is religious, and disdains superst.i.tion and folkways. His academic performance is exceptional. His loss of colour, too, appears to have slowed or halted: although a fresh snowy patch appears at the start of each academic year, and with each anniversary of his father's death, and although there is still some chittering gossip about those that show on his neck and arms, most of the Brahmin quarter has accepted the truth of Chinnarathnam's aggressive proclamations on the condition. And since Vairum has never had friends, he hasn't lost any. He causes his mother little trouble, so she chooses not to worry about him.

For a time, she worries about Muchami instead-cautious, conscientious Muchami nearly drowned in the Kaveri on the very day he was to bring home his bride. Why is it, Sivakami wondered-and then wondered if in wondering she was tempting fate-that terrible accidents so often happen on the happiest of days? It's obviously the evil eye, cast by some poor soul festering with loneliness, but there is also a susceptibility that comes on such days-giddy joy that renders one unable to negotiate the rivers, kitchens and roads one has managed every day of one's life.

Sivakami forbids Muchami to work for some months, until Mari and his mother judge him recovered. Muchami will not disobey but sends a return message: who will walk the fields? He names the tenants whose rent is due, along with three separate cases of complications and exceptions. The messenger, who was, until recently, Vairum's schoolmate, stammers the details of the cases earnestly and with thorough incomprehension. Sivakami, who still walks the fields in her imagination, with the map her husband left, and so knows enough to know what makes sense, recognizes that the ex-schoolboy's report is garbled and illogical.

However inauspicious the precipitating event, this does seem the opportunity for young Vairum to learn the landscape and methods that support his household. They sit down with the map his father constructed ten years earlier, and she goes over the basics. A few borders have changed, families grown, crops s.h.i.+fted, but Hanumarathnam made the chart flexible enough in its conception to admit evolution. It is soft and creased, like Sivakami's two white saris, but it is still the best guide an heir could have.

"I know it's a lot to absorb," she smiles at him, "but if I can do it..."

"No, I get it, Amma," he says, without looking up. He's on his hands and knees and his shadow falls across the topography of their lands like a bird's.

"You'll have to take it to Muchami, because of course he is the one who goes out and talks to the tenants, as you will be doing. He keeps track of the day-to-day details. I only need summaries."

"Mm-hm. Got it."

"I'm proud of you."

He looks up, a little shy.

"And your father would be proud of you, on this day."

Vairum scowls. "If he were around, I wouldn't even be doing this."

"Of course you would: he would have given the map straight to you. I wouldn't have even been in the picture." He's listening. "All this was meant to be yours, to manage as well as he did. Very hands-on, your appa. Knew everything that was happening. Make it your business to know."

Clutching the map to his breast, Vairum marches over to Muchami's hut to collect the correct information. On the community's outskirts, he pauses at the sight of a small crew of his cla.s.sfellows, Muchami's castemates. They are horsing around in a game of keep-away; Vairum recognizes the disputed object as one boy's prized cap. He slows to a halt and watches them, these boys who are not his friends. Once or twice a year, some boys (always Brahmins) start jeering at or teasing Vairum. Though these boys of Muchami's caste readily do the same or worse to one of their own, they come instantly to Vairum's defence.

They notice him and the game stops as they wait for him to approach them. His attention s.h.i.+fts to what he will say and how he should conduct himself, and so he is distracted from thinking that he wouldn't mind being teased as mercilessly as the boy with the cap, if it meant he belonged.

"Muchami?" says Vairum, and they point to Muchami's hut. It's the longest conversation he's had with them since his earliest overtures with trades and math. In the hut, Muchami tells Vairum it's these talents he must summon, to determine if he is cheating his tenant, if his tenant is cheating him, if a merchant is cheating him or anyone else. The acceptability of the cheating involves other sorts of skills, he explains to the solemn boy, other varieties of calculations.

"Don't mistake me," Muchami says. "Your father managed his lands by the code of your caste. You can see that your mother, too, is as strict as strict can be with herself. A person must have a code. Then, if any man says, 'You have done a wrong thing,' you will be able to stand up and say, 'According to my principles, it was right. And I can live by the principles of no other man.' Understand?"

Vairum had grasped all the methods of calculation using weight, cost, quality and season on first explanation, but now wags his head with deep and evident uncertainty. Calculating on the principle of caste? What kind of maths is this?

"You see, Vairum, your father was a real Brahmin. He was a scholar and a healer. He could not be taken for a fool, nor could he appear greedy. How could he one day chastise a poor man for keeping back some few extra grains, and the next, give to the same man holy ash to quell his child's diarrhea? He couldn't. Yet he also couldn't make of himself a laughingstock when every Mussulman market-man is giving him half-half his lentils' worth. So, first thing first: I do most of the negotiating. These peasants are my castefellows. I know all of what they know, and more, and I know how to make them believe I know even more than that. Until I'm better, don't bother doing any negotiating. You are just keeping an eye on things. Secondly, I will tell you all I know-and they know this. Good?"

Vairum nods with somewhat more confidence or, at least, relief: it's evident that until Muchami returns to work, he'll be able to stick to familiar territory.

That evening and the next, Vairum works diligently to make his own copy of his mother's map. On parchment the exact size of the original, he measures, draws and annotates, first in lead and then, meticulously, in ink. He returns his mother's copy to her and tells her, "Ask me any question, any property. Go on."

"You don't want to be looking at your copy?"

"No need. Ask. Come on."

"Veerappan."

"What do you want to know?"

"Crops and yields, nine months ago."

"... Mm. No, not like that." He waves his hand impatiently. "Ask me about now, not ancient history."

"Oh, yes. Well, tell me who-all owns the pond and the well on Achchappan's plot."

He is silent for a second, then bursts out impatiently, "Why do you keep asking me things that are not even on the map? How am I supposed to know all that? I'm in school, not out gossiping with the tenants."

"I'm sorry, dear one. I ... thought all that was on the map." She believes this because, if it weren't, how would she know the answers?

"Well if it were, I would know it."

"Of course, my dear," she says, eager to keep their feeling of complicity.

"I know everything I need to know," he reminds her. "I got all the calculations right, first time."

"Of course." She knows how smart he is.

He neglects to mention that this applied only to the mathematical calculations. Calculations that factor caste by profession to the power of social status, divided by wealth-these, he will have to grow into. His mother guesses at this and is pleased anyway that he has learned enough to become interested, and is interested enough to learn more.

Each day of Muchami's absence, Vairum rises an hour earlier than usual and walks the fields before school. In the late afternoon, he walks the lands for another hour or two, beginning and ending this walk with a visit to Muchami, to discuss his findings. Several people cheat Vairum; several people who always try to cheat Muchami don't try to cheat Vairum, perhaps out of sympathy for the fatherless child. Vairum prefers being cheated: he wants to be treated like a man.

In the first weeks of Muchami's recovery, Vairum shares every detail of his discoveries with his mother. His evening meal sits untouched as he relates litanies of rules and exceptions in owners.h.i.+p, announces projections of profits and shortfalls, and even starts making tentative p.r.o.nouncements on various feuds. His mother reminds him repeatedly to eat, but each time, he takes a mere mouthful and starts talking again.

Sivakami already knows much of what he tells her but enjoys his enthusiasm hugely. She delights in watching her son learn, and learn something close to what she herself knows, unlike the formulas and geography and English that fill his days at school, so far away up the road into town. She can't walk a mile to school in his shoes, but she can shadow him through the fields. He, too, is learning that he likes these formulas better than those of math, physics and chemistry, where the laws are those of the physical world and cannot be bought or bent.

Starting from the fourth week of Muchami's convalescence, though, Vairum grows increasingly circ.u.mspect. One day, as Sivakami serves him his morning meal and he silently eats, she asks lightly, with no trace of resentment, "Why do you not tell me any longer, of the little wars between tenants, of daily variations in monthly projected income? You have not said a word about your work, not for days."

He looks up, a little surprised. "Are you interested?"

"Of course. I studied all this, too."

"Yes, but only because you had to."

"Yes, the same reason as you." She smiles.

"But it's different for me." He frowns.