The Toss Of A Lemon Part 43

"Are you still there?" she asks, quaking.

"I am."

"But I didn't come." She looks down, her lip trembling. "I didn't take the chance when the train... I must have been frightened."

"Mortals refuse most divine offers." He sounds sad. And amused. "You've done nothing new. It reflects well on you that you were tempted. But so few of you accept our gifts, even ones you have prayed for."

Ganesha is the G.o.d of new beginnings, and she missed her chance to end this life and begin another one, fresh. What other divine offers has she denied?

But now Saradha has reached her, and together they make several more turns around the idol. Sivakami thinks Saradha is acting a bit strange, looking at her nervously. She can understand that her dash and insistence might have been alarming. Saradha has had a shock-seeing her grandmother appear, walking on the street with nothing but a bra.s.s jug, as if she were some itinerant person-a siddha, for instance-and not the respectable grandmother she has always known.

Sivakami tries to speak rea.s.suringly, says how glad she is to have visited the shrine, and how invigorating the climb was, and asking which way is Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter and can they see it from up here? They make their way slowly down again, stopping to see whatever Sivakami senses Saradha wants to show her.

She gives in and stays two days in Thiruchi; then it's Sat.u.r.day and a half-day at school. That evening, Krishnan escorts her to Cholapatti. Muchami fetches a locksmith to open the padlock, and Sivakami, at last, is home.

Private Cares 1946-1952.

THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER HER ARRIVAL are spent cleaning the house and updating the accounts. Muchami waits until the second morning before asking, "And Amma, why did you return?"

She has nearly convinced herself that her banishment was her own fault: if she had gone about things differently, introduced the topic more gently, more indirectly, perhaps if she had talked to Vani first, she might have helped. As it was, she just made Vairum defensive.

Still, she knows that if she tells Muchami what happened, Vairum will come off looking bad.

"What could I do there?" She smiles at him. "They didn't need me. They needed a doctor." She tries to make the unfamiliar word sound natural. It's the first time she has told Muchami a lie; they have always colluded in such matters. "They're so modern! I just couldn't keep up."

"I would have come to fetch you," he says. "He only needed to send word."

She realizes Muchami feels guilty.

"He should have asked me to come for you if he couldn't bring you hisself," he emphasizes.

"Himself. I told him not to." It's getting easier to lie: the first is always the hardest, she has learned. "I left quickly so he would not insist. It was not difficult."

She falters at the last. Muchami is not fooled, even if he doesn't know exactly what happened.

"You should have called for me, Amma." He can know nothing of the feelings of a mother for her son, but he has dedicated his life to maintaining the propriety of this household and, out of consideration for her feelings, faults her for its dereliction. "You should have let me do my duty."

Sivakami dutifully writes Vairum and Vani to inform them of her safe arrival. Months pa.s.s without a response and without an appearance from Vairum, who has come every month or two since moving to Madras, to check on his lands and his business interests locally. Muchami walks the fields, as he has always done, though it takes him nearly two weeks now to visit all of the properties, so much have their holdings grown. He ensures that rent is paid promptly and fully, and Sivakami records the amounts in the latest ledger. Once, there is a minor dispute, but he resolves it handily without having to ask Vairum for his intervention, though he invokes the landlord in the mild threats he uses to bring the tenant in line.

Sivakami and Saradha had conferred in Thiruchi and decided that Raghavan, Krishnan and Radhai will all remain there, despite Sivakami's return. The boys have settled into school and are performing relatively well, Krishnan better than his younger brother, who has little interest or patience for study despite his evident talent. It would not do to disrupt them again, much less to return them to the inferior school in Kulithalai. Though Radhai is no longer in school, what would she do alone in Cholapatti? Saradha can use her help-Radhai is an able cook and tutors the younger children, who love her. Though she has been more or less tamed, she retains enough tomboy mischief to keep them entertained. The other reason Sivakami recommends this arrangement, the reason she doesn't tell Saradha, is that she hopes Vairum and Vani may call her back.

Laddu moves back in with Sivakami, but he is away at work for as much as twelve hours a day. After years of efficiently co-managing the hubbub of children, grandchildren, neighbours and friends, Sivakami and Muchami find themselves, when they have finished their daily work, with a lot of time on their hands. Sivakami mentions to Gayatri that her copy of the Kamba-Ramayanam got eaten by worms in Madras. "The damp, Gayatri!" she told her friend. "Bugs I've never seen before!" The next day, Gayatri brought her the gift of a new copy. She never asks why Sivakami returned.

Sivakami daily spends an hour or two reading from the Ramayana, usually aloud to Muchami. Often, they pa.s.s some time in the afternoon playing palanguzhi or Chinese checkers. It's just as well they don't need help from Mari, because her health has continued to deteriorate.

In October, Deepavali, the festival of lights, comes and goes without word from Vairum. She had written to ask if he and Vani might visit, but received no more response to this letter than to any of the others she has written, four since her arrival home. She observes the festival with nothing but a small puja at home since Laddu has gone to celebrate with the crowd in Thiruchi.

She feels similarly dispirited when the days of Pongal arrive in January. Without enthusiasm, she makes big pots of sweet and savoury pongal, the sticky rice and lentil dish that is the emblem of the holiday, enough for all their tenant-labourers. Laddu stays home to receive gifts from the tenants, pumpkins and sheaves of rice or millet, which they leave in the front hall before going around to the shed for their meal. Muchami has cleaned it out for them, and Sivakami has drawn a large, festive kolam on the floor. He and Mari will serve.

It would be a modest but proper celebration, were it not for Mari's strange behaviour. She has been complaining of odd ills for years, and on this day, the first in months when she has been required to come to Sivakami's house, she is more of a liability than a help. She spills several plates of food, saying she can't see the labourers' banana leaves on the floor, or can't see the floor. Then, when Muchami tries to tell her to rest, she loses her temper, yelling at him in front of the gathering. It is highly awkward, but she will not retreat on Muchami's orders. She stands defiantly in the shed until she hears Sivakami's loudly whispered command from the courtyard. She gives Mari a cup of warm milk and, when the feast is done, Muchami escorts her home.

A few days after Pongal, Sivakami hears shoes being kicked off in the vestibule and hurries for the door, trying to outpace a moth of nervousness meandering around her. It is shortly after noon, and she and Muchami had been resting, she in the pantry, he out in the courtyard. She hurriedly puts some snacks on a plate with a tumbler of water, and runs to greet Vairum, saying, "There you are! I didn't know you were coming, and haven't prepared, but I must make a special tiffin. Uppuma Uppuma and and samiya payasam, samiya payasam, yes?" yes?"

Without acknowledging her, he calls out, "Muchami! Muchami!" Pa.s.sing his mother, he goes to the floor desk. Without sitting, he takes the ledger from it and begins looking over the accounts. Muchami arrives at the doorway to the main hall from the garden. "Yes, here," he says, panting slightly.

"This Ch.e.l.lasamy's rent. Why are there brackets around it?" Vairum asks, frowning at the ledger.

Muchami looks past Vairum at Sivakami, and back at Vairum. Vairum looks at him and points at the entry.

"Uh," Muchami begins, "if I'm not mistaken, that was because his brother paid on his behalf, to repay a debt to Ch.e.l.lasamy, but the paddy was not of the same grade. Is that right, Amma?"

Sivakami, who records income and expenditures according to his reports, confirms, "That's right."

"All right. The rest looks good. Shall we go out?" Vairum asks Muchami. He snaps the ledger shut, stows it in the floor desk, puts his shoes back on at the front door and strides away. Muchami looks at Sivakami and, wiping his forehead with his shoulder towel, dashes to catch up with Vairum.

Sivakami stands alone in the main hall for a long time before she takes the plate of snacks back into the kitchen. She makes the tiffin, but Vairum doesn't return that day. Muchami, when he returns, eats the tiffin and takes leftovers home for Mari. Sivakami eats nothing for several days. He asks her no questions and says almost nothing. Laddu, perhaps, never knows what has transpired.

She doesn't feel angry, nor even, really, confused, but just empty of effort and of fear. Now she grows accustomed to that emptiness jutting against the emptiness of the house, which vaults around her menacingly at night, silently shouting reminders of all she does not have.

Vairum visits Cholapatti in March, again coming and leaving without a word for his mother. At the end of April, the school holidays arrive, and with them, her grandchildren and their children, for their summer visit. The house brightens with noise and activity.

So when next Vairum comes, she doesn't hear him enter, she just hears the main hall go quiet. When she goes to the pantry doorway to see why, all her granddaughters are looking at the front entrance. They turn to one another busily, as if to comment on what they have seen, but then catch sight of Sivakami and fall silent again.

Sivakami knows Vairum must have come and gone, perhaps acknowledging them, though her granddaughters saw that he failed to say a word to his mother. She turns from them and goes back to the kitchen. She doesn't want to know what they will say to one another and doesn't want them to think they can ask her questions or offer her comfort. This has nothing to do with them. She's not even sure what it has to do with her.

When Janaki sees how Vairum treats their grandmother, she wants even more badly to stay on. She had already been dreading the return to Pandiyoor: her brothers- and sisters-in-law are planning to move into their own homes in July, and the tension in their home, over the division of possessions and other niceties of the break, was already mounting before she left. But Baskaran's letters to her have been full of the pain this is causing his parents, as well as his longing for Janaki's return, and she can't prolong her stay.

She can see how their presence here must be cheering Sivakami. Saradha had told Laddu and her sisters of Sivakami's bizarre appearance at their home, leaving them all to speculate on the circ.u.mstances. Their convergence in Cholapatti revived the painful topic and the way Vairum ignored Sivakami sealed their consensus that there had been a violent break of some kind. They have heard nothing more of a baby from their aunt and uncle, and indeed, have heard little at all from them in the last year.

Inevitably, Baskaran comes to escort Janaki home. Thangajothi, their daughter, has had a marvellous time with her cousins but is thrilled to see her father. He and Janaki dote on her: a precocious two-year-old, fair, a little too skinny, with jet-black hair that has grown out in curls since it was shaved and sacrificed to Palani mountain a month before her first birthday.

On the train, Baskaran briefs Janaki while Thangajothi sleeps. The new houses are ready to be occupied, but Mr. Kandasamy's modest proposal also included a division of the inheritance. The brothers will walk with their shares. The brothers have become accustomed to the idea of being household heads and are behaving with due combativeness. Shortly after Janaki's return, Senior Mami decides all dowry items and furniture belong to the marital household; her sons overrule her by saying there are now two more marital households. She is so insulted she weeps, terrifying rubbery sounds, and gets a nosebleed that lasts, off and on, for days.

There is much wrangling over how the land is to be divided, which pieces of land are the more productive, and whether this is owing to the tenant farmer, the crop or the location.

In the final moments, Vasantha and Swarna let loose on each other. At meals, they accuse each other of acts and thoughts that had been secrets between them. They try to take back gifts, even from each other's children. Things not given, they steal.

Janaki pities her father-in-law, as now the brothers accuse him and Baskaran of plotting to disinherit them and throw them out. Senior Mami has a mild heart attack, and her husband a sympathetic attack a week later.

It is as though they are living through a scourge, and when it is over, what lingers? Bad feelings that may persist through generations, Janaki thinks miserably, huddling with her husband and child at night, being exceedingly solicitous toward her parents-in-law by day. How can people not see-Vasantha, Swarna, Vairum-that even a family that fights is better than a broken one? Families belong under a single roof. She resolves that, after they move, she will make an extra effort to be friendly with them, and with Vairum. She must work, in every way possible, against estrangements.

It is mid-August when finally the two couples move into their own homes, the week India gains independence and Pakistan splits off: a country born, a country split, parturition and part.i.tion. Northern corridors run with blood-families abandon homes, families abandon families.

Janaki, who has no interest in politics and has lost track of the news, is felled by a fever that keeps her in bed, s.h.i.+vering, for three days. Baskaran goes in search of Palani veeboothi, which she takes in pinches and makes him and Thangajothi smear on their tongues and foreheads as a preventative until she is better.

THE FOLLOWING MARCH, she returns to Cholapatti, a month early because she is pregnant again, due in April. She has made one trip back in the meantime, in November, to visit Kamalam there, who just had her first baby. By the time Janaki gives birth to her twin boys-she and Baskaran compromised this time; the nurse was called but stayed in the courtyard, close at hand, until the babies were safely delivered-the house is full again with her siblings and their children. Laddu has so far refused to marry, but Sivakami has asked his sisters to convince him this summer. He is almost twenty-eight and, given how he has advanced through the ranks of Vairum's concerns and how well he is now earning, a highly eligible bachelor. The women look forward to a little sport at his expense.

Only one concern mars the summer's gaiety, and even that provides them with gossip: Mari has shown signs of increasing delusion and Vairum has been taking her for monthly treatments in Thiruchi. The young women of Sivakami's household press Gayatri for details and she agrees to tell all of them but Radhai, the only one yet unmarried.

"Hysteria," she says, looking at them meaningfully.

They look at her and one another, and then Sita makes a small sound of recollection. "I have heard of that." She looks at her sisters suggestively. "Isn't it... a complaint of a, you know, intimate nature?"

"Exactly. I don't know exactly how long it has gone on, but it sounds like perhaps from the start of their marriage, Muchami and Mari never..."

She pauses and the young women lean in.

"Never had s.e.xual congress." Gayatri nods solemnly. "It's a terrible thing. And now it has started to tell on her health."

"Ayoh!" Saradha exclaims.

"It is terrible," says Janaki, as Kamalam blushes, looking deeply reluctant to learn all this. "Poor thing."

"So how is it treated?" Sita asks, with more curiosity than concern.

"A machine." Gayatri uses the English word. "In the doctor's office. My husband said he had seen advertis.e.m.e.nts for such things, in mail-order catalogues, way back. It does... it's supposed to simulate what a husband should do."

"Ayoh!" Saradha exclaims again, with greater feeling.

Janaki is silent now, full of pity for the both of them. Good old Muchami and his poor, striving wife. Whatever went wrong? Why did they never adopt? They should have had children. It might have saved Mari. She's sure it would have, in fact. Maybe Vairum and Vani will give in and do that before Vani goes entirely the same way. If they don't think of it themselves, though, she can't think of anyone who would be brave enough to suggest it to them.

The treatments appear to be effective, Muchami admits. For a week or two after each one, Mari appears calmer, doesn't drop things as much or fall down, and recognizes him as her husband. The effects ebb, though, and by the time she is due for another treatment, she once more cannot be trusted to cook or serve, and will call Muchami by odd names, sometimes male, sometimes female, and accuse him of histories and doings that are plainly not his.

He is so ashamed, and it is worse for not knowing how he is and is not to blame. He, who has always held duty above all, failed to perform this sacred duty for his wife. He tried, a couple of times, but she rejected him, saying they had agreed: theirs was a celibate marriage. He was grateful, because he had not been confident that he would succeed in satisfying her. He loves her, but much as he loves his younger sisters. He was frankly repulsed by the idea of intimate contact. Perhaps she rejected him because she sensed that.

Inasmuch as he is her husband, though, he is responsible for her health and care. He had taken her to see a number of healers before finally turning in desperation to Vairum. The doctor Vairum took them to see was the first who tried to probe the malady's causes, instead of treating symptoms. Muchami had always feared that their lack of conjugal relations would in some way return to haunt him, and the diagnosis was both a relief and a deep humiliation. He returned feeling unmanned, a feeling that intensified with Mari's first treatment. He waited in the small vestibule of the office-Vairum, mercifully, had dropped them off and said he would return in an hour-while Mari was inside on the doctor's table. Muchami listened to the whir of the machine and then Mari's cries, escalating. They reminded him of his childhood, when, a couple of times, he spied on neighbours at night. This was the first time since then that he had heard a woman o.r.g.a.s.m.

He could feel Sivakami waiting, the next day, for his report on this latest effort. She had been among the first to witness Mari's difficulties, and had been his confidant as he searched for a means to cure her. He had been mum on the results of the consultation with the doctor, except for telling her, when she served his morning meal, that he thought the doctor might have some idea what was wrong. Sivakami had not probed for details.

"That's good," she said gently, not incurious but trusting him to say what he could, looking at him with such compa.s.sion that he was almost tempted to confess.

It had made him feel strange about their relations.h.i.+p in a way he never had before. He has never thought their closeness odd; rather, it was the natural result of their shared life's work. He is so grateful now, though, for the succour of her friends.h.i.+p, something none of his male friends can give him, nor, clearly, his wife. Unlike them, she knows nothing of his inclinations, and yet she feels what he feels, because their missions, their heartbreaks, their triumphs have so long been twinned.

He had nodded at her, and she smiled a little and went to fetch more rice for him as he sighed, exhausted from concern but now resting for a moment in their precious, private complicity.

Touring Talkies 1952.

JANAKI UNFOLDS THE NEWSPAPER and comes face to face with a face she last saw in front of the Madurai chattram, seven years earlier, before the palanquin curtains fell and ended the scene.

She feels the need to smooth her kitchen-puffed hair and re-pleat her sari pallu, which is crumpled and tucked like a crying infant over her shoulder and into her waist. She feels as skinny and provincial as she did as a child, when Bharati used to look past her much as she is now looking past Janaki from Janaki's lap.

The photo accompanies an article, and half of the page opposite is taken up with a movie advertis.e.m.e.nt. It has a border composed of a drawing of Bharati in a three-quarter view expressing pleasure and dismay as though in response to a declaration of illicit love, blending into the valiant leading man, and then into the conniving, mustachioed villain. These images twist like a vine from a tableau along the bottom: Bharati, flowing hair escaping her widow's whites as she wrenches her wrist from one of the men.

The article in Dinamani is a packet of the standard glowing rot: "Miss Bharati, the product of a modest, middle-cla.s.s home in Kulithalai, always had a great love of music and was encouraged by her mother and father to pursue it seriously. Of course, her parents expected her to perform at home only, but Miss Bharati has taken a vow to marry her art only. She has been most inspired by the example of Sri Rukmini Devi, alias Mrs. Arundale, whose thrilling debut onto the Madras stage helped Miss Bharati to convince her doting parents that the Indian cla.s.sical arts can and must be practised by respectable girls. 'It is a necessary step in the building of an independent, modern nation,' said Miss Bharati, an ardent nationalist, who is twenty years complete." Janaki wonders if the paper colluded or was duped into knocking eight years off Bharati's age.

She folds the paper and lies back on the low, narrow cot she has had built for the women's room. She has done the kolam, bathed, dressed and fed her children, sent Thangajothi off to school, consulted with the kitchen staff and overseen the start of the day's preparations. The servants should be leaving any minute with her twin sons, taking them back to their village just as she went back to Muchami's. This gives her a precious half-hour to look through the newspaper before taking a bath, doing her puja and giving the Sanskrit tutorial at the paadasaalai. She's excited these days because there is one new pupil who is quite talented. His gifts took her by surprise because his skin is so dark: she didn't think he looked so bright when he arrived. Now, she finds herself planning special challenges for him, just as young Kesavan did for her and Bharati.

Her sons, Sundar and Amarnath, active two-year-olds, gallop in, damp and toasty from playing in the garden. Every day, they come in at this time and act as though it were a delightful surprise to find her, nearly p.r.o.ne, vulnerable to their attack. Today, they cheer: "Hip hip hooray!" She wonders if they learned the English syllables from their cousin Shyama, a bright boy bound for a bad end. Hers are good boys, she can tell already, and they will remain so if she can keep them from bad influences: Amarnath, a reflective boy who she hopes will outgrow his propensity to cry easily, and Sundar, a resilient bouncy sort who will certainly try his teachers and be beaten but never broken. They are inseparable, which as far as she is concerned is only good.

They throw themselves on her, Sundar with a roar, Amarnath with a squeak, and she submits, pressing their heads to her to quiet them, because grandchildren are not among Senior Mami's interests. Thankfully, she hears the servants call that the prams are ready to go. She kisses the boys and pulls from under the cot a box of wooden blocks they can take with them. The blocks are painted with English letters ; Baskaran bought them in Madurai last year.

She returns to wondering how long it will be before Clouds in the Eyes, Bharati's debut vehicle, comes through Pandiyoor with one of the touring talkies.

Janaki used to say she had never been to the cinema; now she says she has not been yet. She waited until the most conservative families on the Brahmin quarter started permitting their children before she would consider it for hers, though she still has not gone, nor has Thangajothi. Movie-going doesn't cause the gossip it might have once, but it's one of Janaki's points of pride to do everything possible to uphold conservative values in their household.

Folding the newspaper with a noisy yawn, she curls onto her side for a catnap. Clouds in the Eyes, she decides, will be her debut experience, too.

At half past three, Thangajothi arrives home from school, cranky because she is ravenous, and unwilling, as always, to eat. She's a bright girl, but complicated. With her is her cousin, Shyama, who is singing.

"Caw! Caw! Caw!" he bellows, the refrain of one of the season's most popular songs.

Sundar leaps and hinges himself to Shyama's side, Amarnath falls in behind. They've already joined in the chorus, a terrible, joyful caw-caw-phony. Janaki ignores them in the way of young mothers, wearing her authority with little grace. She fetches b.a.l.l.s of thaingai maavu and instructs them to break bananas off the stalk in the pantry, pulls Thangajothi onto her lap and force-feeds her while Shyama entertains them.

He went to the touring talkies last night with his elder brothers, neither of whom made it to college, but who make it to the movies several times a month. Shyama is the youngest child of one of Baskaran's sisters. She married into Tamapakkam, Pandiyoor's other half, across the Vaigai. The groom turned out to be a Communist, which unfortunately resulted in an aversion to work, a love of sloganeering, and a pressing desire to give away his inheritance the moment it dropped into his hands. As a result, he has a lifetime honorary members.h.i.+p in the Communist Party and several unions for trades he has never practised while his family lives on what Baskaran can eke out for his sister by investing the dowry her husband naturally refused. She had capitulated to her husband in naming their first three children-Stalin and Lenin, and a daughter, Russia-but insisted the last have the name of her favourite composer, Shyama Sastri.

Shyama spends more waking time in Janaki's house than in his own, because the food and the audiences are so much better. As he snacks, he renders for them, line by line, note by scene, the film he saw last night, one of the year's causes celebres. celebres. It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister's wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn't know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her. It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister's wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn't know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her.

Shyama acts out all the scenes with verve and conviction but reserves a special energy for the songs, whose lyrics are full of attempts at political subversion. One, a siddha song, goes, "If a rich man tells a lie, it will be taken as a truth ... Money makes leaders of fools... Even when crying over a dead body, watch your pockets!" The song Shyama had been singing when he entered the house asks why all men cannot simply share with their brethren, the way crows do.

"Caw! Caw! Caw! Beggars fight for food in the trash, while the mighty fight for money! Crows always call one another to share food, but people, never... Caw! Caw! Caw!"

"But children, look." Janaki sees an opening. "Crows call other crows to eat. They're not calling sparrows and ducks and monkeys. We all look after our own families, our own community," Janaki points out, confident in her logic. "You see? Brahmins look after Brahmins, non-Brahmins after their own sort."

"Communists are different," Shyama retorts.

"Don't talk back," returns Janaki. A pause follows. "Drink your milk."

Shyama, unoffended, continues the story. The political content of the film becomes increasingly pointed, including specific references to up-and-coming champions of the DMK, newest party in Tamil nationalism, though it is lost on him.

In the film's culminating scene, the brother gulls a corrupt Brahmin priest, castigating him in the voice of the G.o.ddess Parasakthi. When the hero reveals himself, it is to make a speech in cla.s.sical Tamil, a language practically foreign to those in the land of its origins. The DMK is revitalizing it, making a gift to the ma.s.ses of their own tongue.

The film is so popular that most audience members can now recite this curlicued speech, and the syllables thrum from them in the tents of the touring talkies, as they do from Shyama now. Janaki is just about to stop him-the children, who can't understand, are restless, while she can't bear any more polemic-when Baskaran comes in holding a letter and looking grave. He holds up a finger and Shyama stops speaking.

"Janaki." He beckons her to come close and she disentangles herself from her daughter and rises. "We need to go to Madras. Your sister Sita is travelling there for surgery. It!'s"-he clears his throat-"cancer. I'm sorry. She will stay with your uncle Vairum and need help with the children, though of course we would want to go anyway, at least for a few days."

They decide that they can go to Madras for ten days, so Thangajothi doesn't miss more than a week at school. The girl is a top performer and Janaki is keenly interested in making sure she maintains her grades. She and Baskaran have not discussed it with anyone else, but Janaki wants to break with tradition in one critical way, and Baskaran supports her: their bright girl will go to college.

Janaki recalls having thought she noticed a black patch on Sita's tongue last summer, but, with advancing age, patches and discolorations are not unusual. But it was, it turns out, malignant. Sita had gone to Madras for a biopsy some six months earlier, but treatments had failed to halt the spread of the cancer and now her tongue must be cut out in hopes of saving her.

Kamalam arrives in Madras a few days before Sita's surgery; Janaki arrives the day of the procedure. Kamalam minds Sita's elder children, girls of twelve and four, and seven-year-old twin boys, along with her own child and stepchildren, while Vani tends Sita's babies, twin boys as well. When Janaki comes, she offers to help, over the clamouring jealousy of her own twins, with Sita's babies, but Vani refuses. Janaki and Kamalam look at each other, remembering the Adyar Beach scene they witnessed on their first visit to Madras, all those years ago, and hope that Vani will be able to give the babies up when Sita recovers.

They also wonder whether Sivakami has been told. They're almost certain Vairum would not have told her. As far as they know, he has not spoken a word to her since he sent her away. All of Thangam's children have chosen to remain on good terms with him, and he has done nothing to discourage this but has made it clear he wants to hear nothing of his mother. Any time she is mentioned in his presence, he spits some disparaging remark, which wounds them so that they have all learned to avoid saying anything about their grandmother around him.

Janaki must return home but makes Kamalam promise that she will ask Sita, once she is stronger, whether Sivakami knows of the illness.