The Toss of a Lemon (16 page)

“Don’t worry, Sivakami! You worry too much!” says the elder, tucking the key in her bosom. Her younger sister smiles stiffly in Sivakami’s direction but cannot hold her gaze.

Sivakami knows she has just postponed giving them whatever it is they want but knows that Muchami will tell her what happens when the sisters come to Cholapatti and that this will be enough to help her decide her next move. A woman alone is a target, she nods grimly to herself as she prepares the next meal.

THE NEXT ORDER OF BUSINESS will be Vairum’s education. Several of his cousins, slightly younger, are ready to undertake the poonal ceremony—the conferring of the holy thread, which ceremony and emblem signify that a Brahmin boy is ready to begin learning. Vairum might have passed through this gate a year earlier, but Sivakami’s brothers suggested she wait until these cousins could join him, and given the confusion of resettlement, she thought it might not be a bad idea for him to wait to start school.

The family’s Brahminism is a great point of pride for Venketu, Sivakami’s second brother, and so he takes the lead on having his son and nephews initiated into the caste. He drums up a few more participants from the Brahmin quarter: the more boys the priest can do at once, the more everyone will save on fees and feast, so it’s not hard to convince a few cash-strapped parents that their four-year-olds are old enough to understand what it means to be sworn into the caste, to commit to a life of study and prayer with no remuneration. All of these parents want their caste status confirmed, and all will be disappointed if their sons actually honour the letter of this commitment. The sons will be married to Brahmin girls, live in Brahmin quarters, eat only with Brahmins—they will behave like Brahmins socially, but, the parents hope, not economically. Parents with means send their sons to secular schools. Their fond hope is that they are cultivating lawyers or administrators or earners of some white-collar sort. Only families too poor to afford a non-Brahmin education will send their child to a paadasaalai, a Vedic school, to be educated as a priest and remain both Brahminically pure and Brahminically poor.

On an auspicious day, at an auspicious hour, seven little boys gather shivering before dawn, oiled and clean, in new silk dhotis and shoulder cloths. Vairum, a few months short of his sixth birthday, is proudest of all, buddying about with his cousins, giving useless instructions to the confused younger boys. They are all told, by the wise and kindly priest heading the morning’s events, that this is the day of their birth. Anyone can be born from a mother, he tells them, but what sets us apart as Brahmins is this second birth into caste, into knowledge. Each boy huddles beneath a cloth with his parents, who reveal to him the prayer with which, each daybreak, he will petition the sun for illumination. He is given the three intertwined poonal threads that will signal to the world his special status: his right and obligation to knowledge, his right and obligation to poverty (except, not really).

Sivakami is as proud and happy as Vairum is. How nice for him to have a second birth, she thinks, given the circumstances of the first. His birth into learning will be his real birth into life. Vairum turns from the fire and flashes his crooked little smile, his narrow, uneven eyes crinkling. She smiles back shyly, proudly, from behind the kitchen door, and watches as he leans and whispers something to the cousin beside him, who smirks and passes it on, and then all seven are in an uncontrollable fit of giggles and the uncles and fathers get angry with them, but they can’t stop, the ceremony is so solemn and they so gay.

A couple of months later, the school year approaches and the household begins to prepare. There are things to be bought, uniforms, books, tiffin containers, forms to complete and documents to secure. Vairum is of an age to begin first standard and clearly ready in other ways, given his math skills. He has even received his poonal, and so is, in every way, it seems, sanctioned to commence.

Before Sivakami has a chance to ask about how to go about registering him for school, Sambu harrumphs one morning at breakfast, “Vairum is more than ready to begin his education.”

“Yes,” she rejoins. “I was going to say the same.”

“He is a bright child,” Sambu drawls. He takes longer than anyone else to eat his meals. “The math tricks, they prove his intelligence. Did you know the Vedas are highly mathematical? Not that we would know about that, but that aspect will probably hold all kinds of interest for him.”

“Yes,” Sivakami answers, more hesitant now. Do they teach Vedic mathematics in the schools? Maybe it’s an option. “We’d better find out what he needs, especially since he doesn’t have a father to testify for him on those forms.”

Sambu frowns indulgently. “Paadasaalais don’t require forms or fathers. Not much to worry about at all.”

“A paadasaalai?” she repeats. “But he’s not going to a paadasaalai.”

“It’s all fixed, Sivakami,” Venketu breaks in. He is a natural-born salesman and takes every conversation as a challenge to his powers of persuasion. “Don’t argue. He is a very intelligent boy, and if he goes to a secular school, he’ll leave you. Your only son—you don’t want that, surely? A boy educated to some English profession will need to follow his work to cities, but a priest won’t have fancy opportunities to give him ideas. Solid Sanskritic education, because you need him. Anyway, it’s good to have a priest in the family. Father says so. Someone has to respect tradition, with all these boys going the way of the big, bad modern world!”

Venketu shakes with false jollity while she stares at him. Subbu takes his brothers’ side, wheedling, “Who better than the son of Hanumarathnam, who was a one-man repository of tradition, so scholarly, mystical, so famous? Your son will carry on his father’s life work.”

Sivakami is silenced. She has carried with her, her whole life, a faint guilt with regard to her brothers. One of her earliest memories: she was four and Subbu saved her life. She had been about to jump into the family well—out of curiosity and defiance, not despair. She struggled violently against him and when he set her down in front of her mother, she turned and broke his nose. She always felt herself to be stronger than them; she has never, she thinks, fully given any of them the respect and obedience elder brothers deserve to command. Even now, she thinks with resignation, that hasn’t changed. She had no choice in the matter of Thangam’s marriage: a widow has no power to dispute such matters. But she need not let go of her son’s shoulders at this fork in his path. She’s not about to let go unless she absolutely has to.

As it happens, there is a paadasaalai conveniently up the street. It doesn’t have any sort of reputation, but her brothers would consider one paadasaalai much like another, using the same methods and the same curriculum with the same results since the beginning of time. This one is run by charity, so there is no cost. No cost for supplies, no cost for exams, no cost for extra tutoring, no cost for college afterward because Vairum won’t be going to college, that’s for sure. Any costs would have been paid from her money, of course, given to her brothers to manage while she was living in their house. A paadasaalai education would mean no work for them.

And why should they trouble themselves over her son? Any wealth he accumulates is nothing to their family. Even the dowry he will someday attract—certainly more substantial for an engineer than a priest—would only be his, or, at best, Sivakami’s. What use has she or Vairum for wealth? Sivakami wonders if they admit, in the privacy of their own minds, that they are a little jealous of Vairum, of his brains, of the possibility that he might outshine their boys.

She wouldn’t be able to endure seeing her son educated in Sanskrit to waste himself performing occasional ceremonies for the rich, demanding their gifts and gossiping and never leaving the veranda to check on the world without. Priesting is a profession for the poor, the choiceless; Sivakami is not rich, but she is too rich for her son to become a priest. She is a snob, but this is not snobbery. This is cold reason. Firstly, she fears that, because her son has an inheritance, he would grow lazy and corrupt. And then, say he wastes his inheritance and does want for money, the rewards for chanting over fires are no longer sufficient to support a family. The world has changed and shirtless priests, walking the street with nothing but a brass jar, haven’t the opportunities they once had.

Vairum is diamond needle sharp. She fears that if he is not challenged, his intelligence will turn inward and damage him. He must be educated in English to take his place in the new world. Even if he leaves her to fend for herself while he makes his way, even if she will know nothing of his values or career, she must give him this chance. Even if she will lose him by doing so. She didn’t take any such stand on behalf of her daughter because her daughter was not hers to lose. Daughters are born to be the fortunes of other families, but her son’s fortune is hers to find, for him. While she lives with her brothers, however, she cannot take any initiative that is not theirs.

Standing silent on the veranda with her brothers now imitating (badly) their father’s detached and philosophical gaze, Sivakami decides that it is not, in fact, right for her to live with them. She married into another house, and to there she will now repair.

After she serves the night meal, she announces, sounding quieter than she feels, “I’m... I have decided to move the children back to Cholapatti.”

Her brothers cease wiping their mouths, and Sivakami sees Sambu decide he must not have heard her correctly.

She repeats, too loudly this time, “We are very grateful for having had this time here. We are returning to my husband’s—to my house.”

“My dear sister,” her eldest brother says, “that is out of the question.”

She looks up from the floor and nervously at her sisters-in-law. She feels rising in her the stubbornness of the child she was, when she went and played at the river alone every day, despite slaps and warnings, or when she built nests for abandoned baby birds who then filled their courtyard with squawks and offal. When confronted, she sometimes was not able to think of a reason or response, but even when she knew exactly why she was doing what she was doing, she explained nothing.

“Talk to her!” Sambu commands the women, who commence wailing as their husbands retreat to confer. At a look from Sivakami, though, Kamu and Meenu’s weeping stops, while fragile Ecchu’s turns genuine.

Sivakami is as surprised as anyone else to find herself, a twenty-two-year-old matron, behaving just as she did when she was five. She had convinced herself that she had grown to be pliable-reliable and demure. But the next day, she sends her brothers to buy her railway tickets for early the following week, and they obey. When Venketu asks sarcastically how she will pay for her son’s education, the steadiness of her own voice surprises and reassures her, “My husband trained me to manage the lands. The income will be sufficient, and I know how to administer it.”

She has carefully considered all obstacles. In five days, she will march her children out the door and back to the household where she alone is head. It is only after she has overcome her brothers’ objections and made all arrangements that she permits herself to acknowledge—to herself, never to them—that she really would rather have stayed. Her visits back to Cholapatti have been brief, but each time, she has been overwhelmed by the loneliness of the house and glad to return to the affectionate company of her family in Samanthibakkam. Now she has closed that door, and the future sidles from sight.

On the eve of their departure, she wants the children in bed early so she can rouse them early for the train. Thangam is sitting on the veranda as always and comes in as soon as she is called. Vairum is running up and down the street with his gang, pretending to do battle on the plains of Kurukshetra. He gallops past his mother three times, once as horse, once as cart, once as charioteer, until Sivakami gets the attention of one of his elder cousins and commissions a capture. Vairum nobly resists arrest. Then he resists bedtime. They go finally to sleep, Thangam swiftly and sweetly, Vairum with much violent affection, hugging and kissing his tiny mother who is touched but not quite so athletic as to cope with his caresses.

At night’s darkest hour, Sivakami does an oblation for the gods of her father’s house as all its inhabitants sleep, save her. By tradition and by her heart, she no longer belongs here, but she is grateful to have had it as a stopping-place between grief and the rest of her life. She turns to leave the peace of the altar where she worshipped with her mother so many fond years ago and is startled by a listing white figure.

It is her father, roused from sleep, his gossamer hair leaping into the air above him as he moves. He pauses a moment to register her presence, then continues out back for his night business. Sivakami leans against the door of the puja room, thinking how he has aged—so quickly!—from the trim and prideful little man she knew. Her widowhood, and then his own, within weeks of one another: each death sparked in him a minor stroke, so now his left foot appears to be slightly more burden than support, and the left side of his jaw is slung low in the loosening skin of his face.

She hears the shufflestep of his return. He passes her and then stops and, without turning, says gruffly, “I still cannot decide if we were cheated on your behalf. I simply cannot decide.”

She says only, “He left me well provided for, in every way.”

Her father remains motionless; his hair rises and sways in unseen breezes. Their silence admits all the noises of the night beyond and the bricks cooling underfoot. He is the one who speaks: “You know a paadasaalai would be best—ah, for your son, for you. But the world is changing. Maybe the boy should be prepared to meet it when it comes to his door.”

He lurches into motion. He takes his place alone on his bamboo mat; he lays his head on the wooden pillow. The world turns beneath him, and sometimes, he thinks, he feels it move.