The Toss Of A Lemon Part 44

Janaki had framed that article about Bharati in creases, torn it out and stored it between the pages of a book of embroidery patterns, St.i.tches and and Pictures, that Baskaran had given her in the early days of their marriage. She reread it several times in the weeks that followed. Pictures, that Baskaran had given her in the early days of their marriage. She reread it several times in the weeks that followed.

Now, Clouds in the Eyes is coming to Pandiyoor. In contrast to Parasakthi, Parasakthi, it has not been much of a hit and may be here only a few days. Janaki must act. She asks Baskaran to make arrangements for the next day. it has not been much of a hit and may be here only a few days. Janaki must act. She asks Baskaran to make arrangements for the next day.

Their bullock cart and driver are sent around to collect Shyama, his brothers and Baskaran's nephews and nieces. Amarnath and Sundar are installed at a neighbour's house and the paadasaalai cook will feed Baskaran's parents. They set off for a tent in a field. The driver is a great film aficionado, and already unfortunately politicized-he has seen Parasakthi Parasakthi seven or eight times, Baskaran's family servant Gopalan has reported, and Baskaran is considering sacking him before something happens. Tonight, though, he will enjoy some harmless entertainment. seven or eight times, Baskaran's family servant Gopalan has reported, and Baskaran is considering sacking him before something happens. Tonight, though, he will enjoy some harmless entertainment.

As they walk down the centre aisle, people on both sides rise, a caterpillar undulation, men shucking shoes and lowering the flaps of their tucked-up dhotis, the few women hiding behind men and uncreasing a bit of sari to cover their shoulders. Baskaran puts his palms together, bowing to the sides, waving his hand in gentle slashes to tell the people to sit. The family has seats in the chair cla.s.s, behind the benches and those who would be seated on the ground were they not now standing. Even in the costliest cla.s.s, a number of people stand, shuffle and consolidate to ensure the Brahmins are seated together.

The movie is unmemorable yet will earn an entry in chronologies of significant works, owing to Bharati's presence alone. She plays the role of an upper-cla.s.s girl, kidnapped and forced into servitude by a villainous landowner angered at not having her hand for his son. The hero is her sweetheart, who mourns her disappearance with her parents in their home village. He imagines that she escapes her abductors but becomes lost in a forest. In his vision, she wanders, singing to keep up her spirits, melancholy at her plight but full of faith that G.o.d will save her. In a glade, she encounters a harp. As clouds part to light her, she leans her fair cheek against the curve of burnished wood and strokes out rounds of a tune Western audiences would have recognized as "Greensleeves." The lover, wending his own melancholy way in search of a medicinal herb his aged parents asked for, hears her song and follows the notes to find her, the song from his lips joining hers while he is still out of sight. Her voice catches when she hears him, but when she pauses her song and darts futile glances into the woods from her large, kohl-rimmed eyes, his song stops. She trills a signal phrase that he answers; she sings a line or two that he echoes; the rest is easily imagined. The tented audience erupts.

Janaki went rigid with Bharati's first scene and has stayed in a state of high nervousness throughout the film. She has never seen a film before, and this experience is sufficiently incomprehensible, but seeing Bharati makes her wish she had some privacy in which to sort out the muddle of her feelings.

Baskaran nudges his wife. "You know what? She looks like you," he says and winks.

Janaki surges with rage against her old friend. It serves Bharati right, this destiny of performing in front of people one can't even see. Cine-acting may as well be what Bharati was raised to do, though neither she nor her mother could have foreseen it. Bharati surely holds herself well apart from the descendants of obsolete theatre families who also drifted into this variant on their hereditary profession. They have all been cast out together by modernity, she thinks with vicious satisfaction.

Worse, Baskaran is right, though the resemblance, as far as Janaki can tell, is only in their features. She had never dared try to emulate Bharati's gestures, such as the way she moves her eyebrows ironically and hands sincerely, making the viewer feel she is being falsely modest. After seeing how Bharati hunches protectively over the bowl of the veena as though it is a cradle, however, Janaki wants to try it, though she knows she would never do so with anyone else watching. She wonders if an opportunity will arise to tell Baskaran about her connection to Bharati and, if so, whether she'll take it. But when they get home, they talk of other, more urgent, matters: Dhoraisamy's health, which is, perhaps, failing, and the problem of a squatter on one of their plots of land.

The big news of this week, though, is that the creators of Parasakthi Parasakthi-who are touring the eastern part of this region still known as Madras to present to their fans, live and in person, the beloved speeches and songs from the movie-will arrive in Pandiyoor in a few days' time.

A dais is erected in the largest town square and decorated in ribbon-works with the DMK logo-a stylized rising sun-winking from the centre of every pouf. That day, the town is overrun; the square overflows. Every cinema-goer within seventy miles of Pandiyoor has come for the show, except most Brahmins, who stay home.

From the women's room, Janaki and Thangajothi make out the faint boom and echo of miked and undiluted Tamil together with the growing echo and boom of the audience, which spreads along the streets radiating south, east and west from the square so the gathering takes the form of an immense, palpitating DMK logo.

Thangajothi sits on the floor, playing at sorting her collections: tamarind seeds, cowries, pebbles, beads. Her lips move in exact accord with the speeches from the squares. With the first song, her brothers burst through the doorway, fists and hips punching in time, "Caw! Caw! Caw!" and scattering her precious objets. She screams and Janaki suggests they all move out into the main hall and try to disturb Senior Mami a bit less.

The doors to the anteroom and veranda are open, and Baskaran sits outside with his father. He had insisted, like all the Brahmin-quarter parents, that the children stay home from school today. Despite this, the quarter is unusually quiet, and seems even more so than it is in contrast with the noise at the square. Two rays of the rally stretch past the northern entrance of Single Street.

The applause and cheering has built for nearly three hours when it hits a sustained note, the sound of an effort to prevent something from ending. The celebrities must now be descending the dais, bodyguards sheltering them from their admirers. The stars make jocund attempts to sabotage the cordon, reaching across it to tap hands and clasp fingers. The bodyguards push puny, persistent peasants to the sides, creating a corridor for the stars, and then another for the cars, which begin slowly to pull away. The crowd is thousands deep-over half those present dance an escort for their departing heroes, and then depart after them, elated; others sit or walk away; yet another faction of some hundreds, farthest from the cars and closest to the Brahmin quarter, take their feelings to the streets.

Seeing the crowd approach, the Brahmin quarter rises from its verandas, goes inside its houses, closes its doors. Janaki glimpses the distorted faces of the impa.s.sioned oppressed, trying to renounce G.o.d and caste for a better life, as Baskaran ushers his father into the vestibule and slides the great upper and lower bolts into place. "Janaki, make sure the back gate and the back doors are all locked."

Janaki hurries to follow his instructions and finds Gopalan already carrying them out, while Baskaran enters his father's and mother's redoubts to close and bolt the shutters inside the barred windows, and then does the same for all the high windows facing Single Street. Janaki finishes by shunting into place the upper and side bolts for the garden doors, where little Thangajothi is sliding their lower bolts down into the floor.

"I want you all to stay together down here, is that understood?" Baskaran looks at each of their faces in turn. "I am going up onto the roof to keep track of matters."

"No, pa, pa, please," blurts Janaki. please," blurts Janaki.

"It's all right." He pats her hand and mounts the stairs. "They won't even be able to see me, much less reach me, but I want to watch what they're up to."

When Baskaran looks down from the edge of the roof, the horde has rounded from Single Street on to Double Street, filling the empty road as they pour toward the Krishna temple. Three or four other men are on their roofs and they acknowledge one another without sign or sound, lords now serving as their own sentinels. Some in the ma.s.sing throng carry flags or pennants; three badmashes hold aloft a giant portrait of Ganesha, wearing an insult, a garland of sandals, and some others, when they reach the temple, pelt it with their shoes. Baskaran thinks it is this that causes one Brahmin man at the end of the quarter to point, then make gestures as though signalling someone to go. Another joins him. Baskaran shares their outrage at the insults, but thinks, Surely they can't believe these deranged and and unthinking unthinking semi-citizens semi-citizens will pay will pay attention? attention? But now one of his neighbours is shouting west, and the others on their roofs are turning, and their message, relayed without distortion, reaches Baskaran. But now one of his neighbours is shouting west, and the others on their roofs are turning, and their message, relayed without distortion, reaches Baskaran.

"It's Shyama. He's in the crowd. Below."

Baskaran is at his stairs and das.h.i.+ng down even before he comprehends what has happened.

Shyama is a hard child to pen. He had arrived at the Krishna temple from the side near the river in time to meet and be engulfed by the swarm. A young man with a bright face had mounted the temple platform and begun declaiming the atheistic speech. The crowd recited along, as did Shyama, bringing to bear all his own powers of oratory. The men around him smiled down at him, so young, so cute, so full of conviction. Then one of them noticed his holy thread and signalled to his mates by running the point of his finger and thumb from shoulder to hip and back-Brahmin-a gesture that stilled a small ring of men around him.

Shyama stops singing when a shoe hits him on the forehead. He looks around and finds he is surrounded by a half-dozen leering, jeering men, calling him names whose literal meaning he doesn't understand. The men lift their dhotis in thrusting gestures of insult, for forty or fifty seconds, a long time for a child, before their fellows set upon them and slap them resoundingly. Shyama is picked up, patted and placed on the shoulders of a man who either finds it amusing to have a Brahmin mascot for this exercise or thinks this the safest place to put the child for the moment.

Raised above the crowd, Shyama is spotted by the last man on Double Street, but, absorbed again in the action of the rally, he doesn't see the man shout and wave to him, then start to run.

When Gopalan sees his young master run shouting from the stairwell, he slips out the back, telling the cook he is summoning the police, who are circling but not interfering with the demonstration. At the front, Janaki bolts the door behind her husband as he has told her to, and presses her ear against it, sobbing silently so she can open it the instant he returns. Baskaran's father opens his window a crack and sees his son set upon with blows and kicks on his own doorstep, as have been his two equally reckless neighbours along the road.

Two police constables fight their way through the crowd with billy sticks now. With Gopalan's help, they carry Baskaran inside, his nose broken, scalp cut, blood crimsoning his kurta. Five minutes later, Gopalan bangs on the door again, this time with an unhurt Shyama in his arms.

Janaki spends a week nursing her husband back to relative health. Fortunately, most of his wounds are superficial. The first time she sees Shyama, she castigates him.

"Can you see now, what kind of sentiments those are? All men are equal! Bah! Why would they hurt someone, then, who never harmed them?"

Shyama doesn't respond, except to stop coming to their house after school.

Baskaran, once he recovers, speaks to his nephew and persuades him to return, though Janaki cannot help but have another talk with him, in a gentler but still firm tone, and with Thangajothi as well, who she feels is at an impressionable age.

"My own uncle, he is very progressive in his politics. And you know what? He doesn't even speak to his own mother. Can you imagine?"

She hadn't wanted to use Vairum as an example, but feels it is urgent to alarm Shyama.

"We must look after one another, care for our own. Like crows, yes. Otherwise, we will no longer know ourselves."

She has no idea, from Shyama's expression, what he has taken from her speech, but she can see that her daughter is listening.

Two MORE LETTERS COME FROM MADRAS and this time Janaki is the one to receive them. The first, from Saradha, says that Sita has said, in notes on a slate, that she doesn't imagine their grandmother knows anything of her illness. She herself did not tell Amma, but wanted to wait until she recovered to go and tell her in person and seek her blessing. The sisters feel they must permit her this, but the next letter, which arrives two months later, from Kamalam, says that Sita will not recover. Evidently, the cancer has spread: Sita is now dying.

Gathered in Madras, the siblings confer.

"I told Amma I was coming here on business," Laddu confesses, "like I did last time. How can I tell her? She will want to come, and you know Vairum Mama doesn't want that. It would be a debacle."

Raghavan alone among them is in favour of bringing Sivakami to Madras. "Think: it could make them reconcile, when Vairum Mama sees her. Some good could come of this."

His reasoning is not without validity, though all of the others are deeply skeptical. If Vairum felt pity for his mother, wouldn't he have brought her there himself?

It is Krishnan who suggests, "Why don't we ask Sitakka what she wants? "

Sita is now lucid only for brief periods, when the morphine wears off or when it is first taking hold. Just after she receives a dose, but before she drifts off, they put the question to her. She takes up a piece of chalk and scratches dim letters on a slate: "No. It would hurt her too..."

Three days later, she dies. Among her effects, they find a sealed letter to Sivakami, and one to her brothers and sisters, whose contents are roughly the same. When the funeral is concluded, the granddaughters all go with Laddu to Cholapatti, to deliver the first to their grandmother.

Sivakami is instantly alarmed on seeing them. Saradha asks her to sit, and when she has, Laddu gives her the letter.

Dear Amma ... ...

Sivakami starts to cry, in fear, it seems. Five months have pa.s.sed since she last saw her grandchildren, all together for the holidays. She puts the letter down, dries her eyes and her palms on her sari and picks it up again.

You used to tell me I had a malignant tongue, and that it would be my ruin. Tell, G.o.d is finally punis.h.i.+ng me: I won't see my children grow up. I didn't know my sins were so great, but what do we know? My illness has taught me how small and insignificant I really am.I don't have much longer now, I can feel that. My sisters will tell you details if you want them: I had cancer of the tongue, but even after the doctors removed my tongue, the cancer was not gone.The one blessing that I have received is that, just as you and Vairum Mama cared for us when we were growing up, he and Vani Mami will raise my sons. They have wanted and deserved children for so long. It is some consolation to me that my sons will have a mother. My husband and I have given them leave to adopt.Please don't blame my brothers and sisters for not having brought you to Madras to see me. It is better you remember me as I was.Your ever-loving granddaughter,Sita Sivakami shudders. She considers chastising her grandchildren but feels a cool cloud of reason settling over her: Sita evidently told them not to bring her, and why? She didn't want to jeopardize the adoption by going against Vairum's wishes. Sivakami doesn't think it would have, but now Sita is gone, and Vairum is a father.

She realizes she has been silent a long time and looks at Saradha, Kamalam, Radhai and Janaki, who are holding hands and weeping. Their sorrow must be combined with guilt, for shocking their grandmother, especially after the fact, for not having liked Sita more, perhaps even for questioning Sita's motives in the adoption: her sons, born to a lower-middle-cla.s.s household, will be raised in riches. Their house may not have sons for seven generations, Sivakami thinks ruefully, but who knows whether those old rules even hold sway any more.

She goes to take the ritual bath that must follow immediately on news of a relative's death. She is feeling, also with guilt, another emotion she can't stop. A son of her son, a son of her son. As if borne on a train, a rush of images fill her mind's eye: Vairum with two children, coming to show them to her, his snapping black-diamond eyes softened by affection, delight, pride, all the emotions denied to him all these years. Now that her wishes for him have all come true, he will bring the boys and they will all be hers again, the house lit with their laughter.

Some weeks later, Janaki's daughter Thangajothi, is coming home from school, her cousin Shyama absorbed in a book beside her. Their bullock cart pa.s.ses a row of huts they pa.s.s every day and a woman emerges to sc.r.a.pe a pile of rice out of a pot into the shallow roadside ditch. As the children's bullock cart continues up the road, Thangajothi sees a crow circle and land, find the rice and start to eat.

He eats alone for a full five minutes before he calls his fellows. "Caw! Caw! Caw!"

Bharati Moves In 1957.

A HULLABALOO STARTS UP in the back of the concert hall, and Vairum and Vani's five-year-old sons, Kartik and Kashyap, jump onto their folding chairs to have a look. As Janaki reaches for them with an angry warning, Sundar and Amarnath clamber up to copy their cousins. When she turns to yell at them, Kartik's chair folds and he falls through. Janaki pulls the crying child up and sits him on her knee to dust him off, and glances apologetically at Vani, who is onstage tuning her veena, and apparently as oblivious to the commotion in the front row as to that in the back. The other boys have been distracted by the accident, but now Thangajothi is wandering toward the aisle to have a look at who is arriving-some politician or musician they wouldn't even know, probably-and Janaki orders her back unceremoniously. Celebrities are everywhere through the Madras concert season.

On stage, a man in his twenties, tipped toward a polio-stunted leg, his wavy hair slicked into a kudumi that now looks like a proclamation of adherence to old fas.h.i.+ons, squawks through acknowledgements and sycophancies on behalf of the group that sponsors this venue, one of the best attended in the Madras concert season. Eventually, two a.s.sistants weighed down by fat floral garlands emerge from stage left. The MC sways and swivels toward Vani and her accompanists to pay them the honours, which they accept and refuse at once-removing the decorations even as these hit their shoulders-in the spirit of this democratic age: "ThankyoupleasenothankyouIamnotworthy."

Janaki and the children, as special guests of the featured artist, are in the front row. She gets the children settled as the rest of the audience clap, but they get restless again within minutes of Vani beginning the kirthanai, kirthanai, and Janaki rearranges them, so that Kartik is on the other side of Thangajothi, and Kashyap between her and Janaki. Sundar is to Janaki's right and Amarnath on the other side of him-if Janaki can separate her children from their younger cousins, she can trust them to behave, but Vairum and Vani's boys are difficult under any circ.u.mstances and she is already grimly antic.i.p.ating that she will miss most of the concert. She would have preferred to leave them at home with the help, but she wanted her own children to come and it was difficult to bring them without pointing up the younger boys' unmanageability. and Janaki rearranges them, so that Kartik is on the other side of Thangajothi, and Kashyap between her and Janaki. Sundar is to Janaki's right and Amarnath on the other side of him-if Janaki can separate her children from their younger cousins, she can trust them to behave, but Vairum and Vani's boys are difficult under any circ.u.mstances and she is already grimly antic.i.p.ating that she will miss most of the concert. She would have preferred to leave them at home with the help, but she wanted her own children to come and it was difficult to bring them without pointing up the younger boys' unmanageability.

She's made her peace with not paying full attention to Vani's playing; she has had the equivalent of a private concert each of the last few days as Vani has practised at home, and she will stay with Vani and Vairum ten days longer. It's Janaki's first time attending the Madras concert season. She intends to relish it. She taps Kartik's and Kashyap's knees sternly. Thangajothi stares dreamily at the stage. It's already breaking Janaki's heart that her daughter is not musical. Amarnath is the only one of her children with real promise in this department. Baskaran got him a first-cla.s.s mridangam two years ago, and an excellent tutor. Sundar is made to partic.i.p.ate in the lessons and makes no pretense of gaining anything from them, but is not jealous of his brother's talent. Thangajothi attends veena and vocal lessons with two of her school chums at a neighbour's. Janaki insists on the lessons but never makes Thangajothi practise at home because she can't bear to listen.

Intermission. Alone, Janaki might have made some attempt to move into the crowd, see if she recognizes anyone, have a glance at the new fas.h.i.+ons, but today, she does no more than herd the children around the back of the concert hall to relieve themselves. Thangajothi refuses, feeling herself too old, at ten, for public urination.

When they are seated again, Vairum arrives, clearing a path through the noise to join Janaki in the front row, creating more noise in his wake as people realize who he is. She's relieved to be able to turn his sons over to him. He sits one on each knee and whispers to them through the second half. By the end, Kartik is asleep on his shoulder and Kashyap appears to be paying attention to the music. Who could have guessed Vairum, with his pa.s.sionate tempers and dogmas, would make such a patient and attentive father?

Afterward, they go backstage, a large lean-to with a thatched roof like that over the concert hall. On one of the mats, Vani reclines against a bolster and accepts a tumbler of hot lemon water. Her children bound toward her and Kartik steps in the ill-tempered ghatam player's coffee. By the time Vairum has finished apologizing, the mat is aswarm with ants attracted to the sugar. Vairum offers the artists lifts home, but other patrons are in wait to pay similar favours and the children have great and inadvertent powers of dissuasion. At home, they alight into that urban dusk Janaki loves, its glow intensified by layers of dust and pollution.

All through the evening, Vani receives gifts with notes from admirers who were present and those who could not attend: boxes from The Grand Sweets, garlands that putrefy in the puja room, statuettes of G.o.ddess Saraswati. There are visitors-international businessmen, political pet.i.tioners, fawning philanthropists-all of whom are received with efficient grace.

The next morning, the gifts resume. Servants transport them to the appropriate corners of the house even as Janaki listens to Vani's daily practice and readies herself for a 1 p.m. concert. She will leave the children at home today, and frets over this, though the children are pleased. Thangajothi has books, the boys have each other, meals and snacks appear exactly when they should and none of them can get out-Janaki repeats all this to herself as she rattles in a cycle rickshaw toward the Music Academy, not far at all, she tells herself. A servant can run and fetch her in twenty minutes if anything... nothing will happen, she tells herself until, with relief, she returns home at four. The children have hardly noticed her absence, and she resolves on relaxing when she attends the festival in subsequent days.

She has finished her bath and is combing her hair when she hears yet another visitor arrive. Vairum is not home from work yet; Vani doesn't entertain. And it is her practice hour, so this person will be snubbed. Janaki has seen this here before-for a visitor in the know, it's a mark of inclusion not to take offence. She strains with curiosity to hear what will happen, as, her plait coiled at her nape, she hurriedly drags the comb from her part to her ears, once on each side. She dabs vermilion onto her forehead and freezes, her finger in her part, as the visitor's voice resolves out of the household hum.

It's not a voice Janaki would have recognized any longer had it not been restored to her through film, given as a gift to all Tamils. She is a provincial treasure, now that there is a Tamil province, that face, that grace, those now-beloved gestures.

Vani begins her evening session. The music's effect is as familiar as its form is unfamiliar, and Janaki hesitates, but can't wait long before entering the main hall to join the audience of one. Bharati, arrayed on the white divan, stands and nods a greeting, more composed than Janaki, as always. But how has she come to be so coolly sitting in Vairum's salon? Is Janaki's appearance, for her, a surprise? They sit in silence, giving Vani their full and companionate attention-a familiar and unforgotten state, though Janaki is soon distracted by her own thoughts.

She has changed out of the heavy-bordered maroon silk she wore to the concert, but makes a point, in Vairum's house, of always wearing a sari suitable for receiving guests of standing. She's glad she's not embarra.s.sed by her own appearance, though she is awed and mildly dismayed by Bharati's. In contrast with Janaki's matronly nine-yard windowpanecheck sari, Bharati is splendid in the latest thing, a five-yard "sugar silk," a fine silk spun roughly so that, woven, it gives a crystalline effect, in her signature colours, which are now all the rage: baby mango green with a marigold border. Janaki thinks the sari is a bit young for Bharati-not for her public age, true, but for her real one. But Bharati is, in the modern sense, unmarried, and-as far as Janaki knows, she thinks with a retrospective wince-childless, not to mention that she's part of the world of s...o...b..z, all of which makes such display less inappropriate than it might be were her situation comparable to Janaki's own.

She steals looks at Bharati, whose beauty has been sharpened by age and experience, though the camera doesn't show the faint lines evident now to Janaki. On screen, Bharati looks like a sheltered innocent miraculously graced with the best effects of age-poise, wisdom, temperance. She appears to combine, Janaki admits, the best qualities of her half-sisters-Visalam's light humour, Janaki's creative spirit, Kamalam's inviting warmth-and none of the worst: not Sita's bile or Saradha's stodginess.

Janaki tries to keep face forward and listen to the music-she's only here for twelve days, she doesn't want to miss anything. Once, she looks at Bharati inadvertently and finds Bharati looking at her. Bharati raises her eyebrows slightly and smiles; Janaki smiles, too, briefly and with strain, and looks back at Vani.

When Vani's session ends, they sigh in concert, by then unconsciously and wholly absorbed in the music and regretting its close.

And now, they must talk.

"I suppose you're in town for the concert season," Bharati begins without awkwardness.

"Uh, yes, yes, that's right." Janaki wishes she could sound more natural. "I brought the children."

"Were you at Vani Mami's concert yesterday?" Bharati rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "I thought it was just marvellous."

"Yes, yes, you were there?" Had that been Bharati, creating such a stir in the concert hall? "We, uh, were in the front. With Vani Mami's children, and mine."

"Right. The children."

Is this a sore point? Just then, the children and Vairum arrive, Vairum's sons borne in his arms, Janaki's brood cl.u.s.tered behind.

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo!" Vairum hails them.

"h.e.l.lo, Vairum Mama, are you well?" Bharati bounces up, addressing Vairum with a familiarity that surprises Janaki. "Yesterday's concert was just too good, was it not?"

Vairum gestures to her to sit. Janaki's children come to stand beside her, but as soon as Vairum sets down his boys, they run to Bharati.

"Bharati Mami, we were playing kabbadi."

They lean compet.i.tively onto Bharati's knees.

"Bharati Mami, I won!"

"I won! I won!"

"Well, you can't have both won." Bharati picks up one of each of their small hands in her own. "But fortunately, that's not the important thing. If you played well, you will always win in the end."

"I played well!" cries Sundar.

"I played well!" accuses Amarnath.

They all seem very familiar, Janaki can't help but notice.

"And these are your children?" Bharati asks Janaki.

Thangajothi and her brothers are jostling genteelly on the side of their mother away from the movie star, nearest the wall.

"Yes, Thangajothi, Amarnath, Sundar, say h.e.l.lo to Aunty."

They do. Janaki prays that Thangajothi will say nothing about how her father teases her mother for seeing all of Bharati's films. It's unnecessary : Thangajothi is so shy around strangers that her parents worry for her. She's not the one who's going to spill embarra.s.sing details.

Vairum has called for tea. "So you've met my niece, Janaki."

"Yes, it's funny..."

"Yes, we were..."

They begin once more in concert, Bharati warmly and Janaki wanly, so that it is clear Bharati would have told of a long acquaintance and Janaki might have said no more than that they had been chatting as he showed up. They stop, realizing this. Vairum is looking from one to the other closely.

"Did you ever meet in Cholapatti?"

Bharati wags her head while Janaki is too tense to respond. Vairum turns to her children.

"Bharati lives just across the street-that big white house, did you see it?" he asks.

Janaki's children nod, silent, awed.